2021 Year-in-review for the Drupal Community Working Group

As the Drupal Community Working Group (CWG) enters its 9th year, we feel more than ever it is our duty to continue to pursue our mission to "foster a friendly and welcoming community for the Drupal project and to uphold the Drupal Code of Conduct". With this guiding principle, we have been focusing on both proactive and reactive tasks to help us achieve this goal. 

With practically no in-person Drupal events in 2021 due to the pandemic, much of the conflict resolution work has been related to online interactions. Thankfully, the overall number of conflicts reported to us was less in 2021 than it was in 2020.

This annual report will serve as a summary of what we've accomplished over the past year, as well as a discussion of some of our goals for the near future.

Community Health Team

The Community Working Group was expanded in 2020 with the creation of the Community Health Team. The mission of this new team is to focus on proactive community health tasks including workshops and knowledge transfer. As a refresher, the Community Health Team is tasked with the following:

• Community Event Support - provide resources and support related to the Code of Conduct for Drupal events.
• Community Health - provide opportunities to educate and train community members to be more effective contributors.
• Membership - to help identify and recruit community members for the CWG. 
• Ambassadors (subject matter experts) - provide expertise and advice related to geographic, cultural, and other differences both inside and outside the Drupal community.

Community Health Team members are not privy to Code of Conduct incident reports; however they must adhere to the CWG Code of Ethics.

The team has continued to work on the following proactive community-health related projects:

• Initial work on a Drupal Code of Conduct update.
• Continued development and monthly meetings of a group of community health representatives from other open source communities.
• Ongoing Code of Conduct contact workshops.  
• Initial authoring of the Drupal Event Accessibility Playbook.  
• Blog posts related to community health.
• "Nudges" for Drupal Slack Workspace and issue queues.  

Long term goals for the Community Health Team continue to include providing an on-ramp for the Conflict Resolution Team and identifying and presenting additional community-health-related workshops for the community.

Conflict Resolution Team

In May, 2021, the Conflict Resolution Team welcomed its newest member, Donna Bungard (dbungard). We are planning on adding multiple new members to the team in 2022. 

The Conflict Resolution Team continues to work on on-going and new Code of Conduct related issues. During our weekly meetings, we generally work on three types of tasks:

• Internal business - examples include recruitment, public blog posts and presentations, Aaron Winborn Award, event organizer requests, other non-conflict related requests from community members.
• External, old business - ongoing conflict resolution tasks normally brought to us from community members.
• External, new business - new conflict resolution tasks, normally brought to us from community members.

While some conflict resolution tasks can be resolved quickly (a few days), we normally have several long-term, on-going issues that can take anywhere from weeks to months to resolve. Most of the long-term issues include ongoing personality conflicts within the community, but we have continued to work with community members who had previously had their community privileges limited on plans and tasks to have those privileges restored (see our Balancing Accountability and Compassion in the Drupal Community blog post).

What types of conflict resolution issues do we work on?

We decided to perform a quantitative analysis of the number and types of conflict resolution issues we work on, comparing data from 2019 and 2020 with data from 2021. Our methodology allowed us to assign one or two of the following categories to each new issue we received during 2019-2021:

• Social media conflict
• Issue queue conflict
• Drupal Slack workspace conflict
• In-person Drupal event conflict
• Virtual Drupal event conflict
• Not CWG domain
• Other - examples include content issues on Drupal.org, issues related to local Drupal communities (but not directly related to an event), interpersonal issues occurring in areas not covered by any of the other categories.

In terms of overall number of incidents, we continue to see fewer new conflict-related incidents, with 14 reported during 2021 (compared with 35 in 2019 and 17 in 2020). 

• Not surprisingly, the number of conflicts reported from in-person events was zero.
• We had zero incidents reported to us from social media conflicts between Drupal community members. 
• The number of issue queue conflicts were down to 6.

Looking forward

Conflict Resolution Team: Membership

With multiple current conflict resolution team members having served more than 3 years on the team, one of the primary goals for 2022 is adding new team members. We have been interviewing multiple candidates already in 2022 and hope to have an announcement soon.

One of the goals of the Community Health team is to provide an on-ramp to the Conflict Resolution Team. We will ask all potential Conflict Resolution Team members to join the Community Health Team as a prerequisite.

With the addition of Donna Bungard in 2021, we were able to document and formalize our on-boarding process for new conflict resolution team members. During the on-boarding period, new members mostly shadow the team and have limited access to historical conflict resolution reports. At the conclusion of the trial period new members will either become regular members or be asked to leave the team. As is prescribed by our charter, all trial members must be approved by the CWG Review Panel. 

Community Health Team: Code of Conduct

Our continued goal for the Community Health Team is for them to be a force for good in the community. Our plans for the next year include a stronger focus on the aforementioned Drupal Code of Conduct update, assisting with the expansion of the Community Health Discussions group from various open source communities, and continued support for our other proactive community health initiatives.