#111 Community Management proposal
Closed: resolved 5 years ago Opened 6 years ago by rhea.

With the recent events around the Fedora community, Code of Conduct (CoC) discussions (#105 and others) and the Diversity Adviser seat empty, I would like to propose a change, a solution.

I would propose a group of people, a committee, to act as:

  • Diversity Adviser
  • Handle CoC violations
  • Moderation management

I suggest this to be three or five people, instead of but one Diversity Adviser, because one person can not make these rather important decisions. These would be elected by the community or simply appointed by the council. They would ideally have some background in community work, such as community management, moderation, diversity and inclusion. I propose that this body be the one discussed in the ticket #105

I would like to further propose moderation guidelines for all of our community (from IRC, through mailing lists to other communication media or fringe communities) which would be modified version of what I describe in this article where the core idea is based on communicating the problem in order to educate members of the community instead of simply removing the guilty party, to raise the community as a child.

You can notice that I describe a project that would be a simple website to track users "naughty activities" and also to report CoC violations and other problems. It would use ipsilon to authenticate the user and based on their fas group membership give them access to these reports, these would be discussed in private meetings. As far as the concern expressed in the #105 about safety of the data and privacy, I could deploy this on my own server where nobody has the access. It would be a simple ASP.NET Core project using ipsilon and an sql database. If you like the idea, I'll work on it.

So what am I proposing is that the Diversity Adviser role be replaced by a group responsible people with the right tools, where their responsibilities would be greater than that of the current Adviser role. They would be responsible for handling the drama in our community and making sure that it is a good and inclusive place for any and all the contributors.

Why? I don't think that the council should be bothered with community drama, and I don't see anyone else able to do that.
Why not the whole Diversity team? Because it is open to public and anyone can join. I trust neither the random anyone nor a single person with this kind of major responsibility.


How is this proposal fundamentally different from the Community Working Group that was already attempted and failed?

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Community_working_group

Well, frankly, I wasn't here back then, so I wouldn't know what actually happened and how it went down. Maybe the right dedicated people to push it in the right direction were missing.

I've got my experiences managing large communities and I know that the current state of Fedora is not exactly the pink garden - especially for the people responsible (council) and something should be improved or changed.

I'd like us to not confuse the role of our Diversity Advisor with the CoC violation management process.

Our Diversity Advisor needs to be focused on helping our community become more diverse and continue to be diverse.

The Code of Conduct is but one aspect of diversity and it is also a lot more. The management of violations of the CoC is not an inherently diversity issue. It is a full community issue as not all CoC violations are related to directly to diversity.

I believe that the council is doing a lot of what you suggest already. The council has taken it upon itself to act as the committee you are proposing. This will allow the council to truly understand the work required and to find the best solution moving forward. As has been pointed out, we've tried other solutions and have had limited success.

As for your comments on moderation, etc. I'd like to see you fold the specifics into a #105 so we can debate a specific proposal. Thank you.

Having a dedicated team to handle CoC violations looks to me like we expect to have may issues to deal with, in this area. Fortunately I do not believe this is the case.

@jkurik

Having a dedicated team to handle CoC violations looks to me like we expect to have may issues to deal with, in this area. Fortunately I do not believe this is the case.

No that is not what I'm talking about. Community management is large area, not only handling CoC violations. Much more. Writing guidelines, teaching the moderators, getting the right tools in place, making sure that the moderators actually do what they're supposed to, and all that in not just one community, but if we consider telegram, reddit and other media not officially supported... we should participate and make sure that our community is safe there as well. Then the whole diversity area... Trust me it's plenty of work to keep a whole team occupied all the time.

@bex

I'd like us to not confuse the role of our Diversity Advisor with the CoC violation management process.

which is why I say that it would be but one part of the group, one third of their responsibility. I believe that these parts should not be separated, diversity is something that should be fully considered when handling the community, from moderating a chat room to more serious coc related stuff.

Council is already doing it, the question is, are you sure you want to do that? I would rather see your time focused towards more important tasks of running the whole train instead.

As for your comments on moderation, etc. I'd like to see you fold the specifics into a #105 so we can debate a specific proposal. Thank you.

It's all in my article, it says it all. I would push past CoC though, towards irc, suggest this to fringe communities such as telegram or other communities of users, etc...
I sadly can not read the closed-off thoughts of the council to be able to actually know what does #105 mean, I've been lurking in the meetings, still not enough information. I am unable to apply my ideas in that ticket at this point.

Metadata Update from @bex:
- Issue assigned to bex

6 years ago

Metadata Update from @bex:
- Issue priority set to: Waiting on Assignee

6 years ago

Metadata Update from @bex:
- Issue tagged with: code-of-conduct

6 years ago

Metadata Update from @bex:
- Issue unmarked as depending on: #145

5 years ago

We have considered your feedback and we have decided to continue forward with a new CoC proposal and Council management.

Metadata Update from @bex:
- Issue close_status updated to: resolved
- Issue status updated to: Closed (was: Open)

5 years ago

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