[meta] Seeking input into the role of a Community Working Group Team

I'd be willing to help, though I'm not sure what that entails.

I'm happy to help as well. I have formal conflict management training and have even used it at DrupalCamps.

Although I've occasionally been a party in conflict, I've always been respectful and both open and available to work through those conflicts.

I'd be willing to help. My experience is mostly from a couple of seminars and course work in grad school. Not an expert by any means, but willing to help where I can.

I'm interested in learning more about what this involves.

Yup, same here. Thanks for everything you're doing, kattekrab!

Honestly, I'm not sure if we've really figured out what this involves yet, which is why our responses in this issue have been mostly absent.

The general thing we're trying to achieve is the ability to scale the CWG beyond just the 4 existing members, who are all a) volunteers, and b) extremely busy with other important roles in the project (this is how we got trusted enough to be on the CWG in the first place :P).

It's well-known that the best way to resolve conflicts is directly in the moment they happen. A simple "Hey dude/dudette, not cool." can, in the vast majority of simple arguments, often completely dissipate a conflict before it becomes a huge thing, if it's said in the moment, and in the same channel in which the conflict occurs (Twitter, IRC, etc.). The person under attack feels backed up; the person doing the attacking often can catch themselves and say "Whoops, sorry. Got carried away there. What I meant to say was..."

However, obviously the four of us cannot be there for each and every conflict. And even if we could, we don't necessarily want to, because it is absolutely emotionally exhausting work when done on a daily (or sometimes hourly) basis.

So we've talked about creating some kind of "Community Working Group Team" (somewhat like the relationship between the Security Working Group / Security Team) who could be "first-responders" in cases of conflict. This would allow us to cover multiple time zones, allow people to take a break from doing it if they're having a 'day', etc.

However, I personally have my doubts about this. Because the way we'll be most successful is if conflict resolution becomes a community responsibility, not just a CWG(T) responsibility. I don't want to see us get into the situation where people feel disempowered to speak up because they feel like it's not their "place" since they don't have a fancy group affiliation, nor do I want people to feel like it's "someone else's job" to step in when something occurs.

So given that, I'm wondering if folks here who've expressed interest in helping the CWG have ideas on how we can make the shift towards the wider community feeling empowered to "if you see something, say something" in cases of conflict.

Thanks, webchick. Great insights and suggestions.

The thought that immediately comes to my mind is to simply build a team of trustworthy people and point anyone who's experiencing conflict to those team members, perhaps based on criteria that stands out, including geography and, personal history.

This is similar to what the Drupal Association Community Cultivation Grant Program does with grant applications, at least in my case. Several grant applicants had ideas similar to what I've worked on in the past and I was put in touch with them by a member of the grant committee.

For this to work, I think the CWG just needs to reach out to folks and recruit them. I actually thought that was what this thread was about :) I'm interested and can make time for this and a couple of the local organizers here already do this a fair amount whenever there are conflicts or situations with inappropriate behavior.

For every conference, for example, we have a list of who to contact if there are any issues, including violations of our codes of conduct. For GLADCamp, we explicitly list the ones who have agreed to help with conflict at https://gladcamp.org/2014/code-of-conduct and now our local community knows that they can reach out to them without any fancy group or affiliation.

I can picture the CWG Team with lots of participants all through out the Drupal community who are then supporting and be supported by one another. This is the best way I think the culture and values of conflict management and non-violent communication can spread and be picked up by more and more people in the larger community.

At that point, we'll have a network of first responders who are leading by example.

update: edited the last sentence to say "first responders".

> Because the way we'll be most successful is if conflict resolution becomes a community responsibility, not just a CWG(T) responsibility.

I agree, wholeheartedly. Culture change, and empowerment is a tricky subject though. It can start with good intentions, yet cause problems of its own. I wish to think on this a bit.

I did see your IRC conversation today, which I assume partly spurred this. I didn't witness the initial comments, but won't claim that I would have spoken up. Mostly, because I didn't have any background information on what looked to be a conflict with some history. Because of that, I wouldn't have felt "empowered" to get involved. It is hard to say something without it sounding like an accusation, which we don't want to do without all the information. Rarely do we witness the genesis of a conflict, which makes us rational-minded folks hesitate to get involved. That is a barrier we'll need to figure out.

Hey everyone!

We would like to reignite this thread after ongoing discussions in our meetings around what a wider "Community Working Group Team" could or should look like. I've altered the name of the thread to focus on definition of role rather than recruitment at this stage, with the recruitment coming once we know what people would do.

We've identified in the CWG two main areas where we see a vital role to be played and would be the minimum viable to form the team around:

1) DrupalCon support - the group is so busy during DrupalCon and it would be great to have representatives at each event that could help when issue reports arise.
2) Issue Queue support - there are a number of issue queue conflicts that could be dealt with through intervention by members of the team and escalated when required.

In short this would mean people to offer conflict resolution support for things not severe enough to go to the CWG, where the conflict is being played out in public or levels of privacy are not as high as some of the major issues reported. In addition a subtle role in changing the culture as discussed above would hopefully be assumed :)

The process would be to have a team of people that when an issue that fits into the above occurs we can call upon to help based on expertise, character, background and timezone.

The process of recruitment will be the next step in thought but we're really interested to get feedback and input into the above proposal and see if people think it would work, what we should develop further and anything we may have missed.

I think it would be great to specifically target/recruit by location, as well as by job function, role, etc. People are likely more comfortable engaging with people with commonality, as well as in the same timezone/language/nationality.

Is training included in the proposal for these team members?

Could you go into #2 in a little more detail? Does this mean having a team that proactively monitors the issue queues for conflicts that occur, or reacting to conflicts someone has been notified about?

Count me in for helping with issues that arise at DrupalCon events.

I have conflict management experience and have de-escalated events at DrupalCamp LA (this is private but details are available upon request) and in the local LA community, including https://groups.drupal.org/node/244963

In addition to that, I helped create the governance policy, including the conflict management and resolution section, for our user group at http://www.drupal.la/governance

One way I could picture #2 is something like the "Community team" like we have a "Documentation team" or a "Security team." This team would consist of lots of members, from all over the world, with lots of backgrounds, and with lots of timezone coverage. We would need team members to go through some sort of approval process/training, given that the types of issues the CWG deals are often delicate with very strong feelings involved, and so we need to be careful about who we give an "official" badge to. However, we'd try and keep this as lightweight as possible... maybe something like the security team does where someone on the existing team has to vouch for them and offers to mentor them for the first few weeks.

The reason I think this could work better than the existing process is:

1) We already know people severely under-report community issues to the CWG, despite various changes over the years such as including a "No action needed" option on the incident form, etc. The CWG is seen as a "severe" step, as a last-ditch effort, and people "do not want to get anyone in trouble." (I would guess that maybe 1/4 of the existing incident reports were actually filed by CWG members for tracking purposes, not by community members themselves.)

2) I also believe (would need some stats to back this up) that in the CWG's most successful cases of conflict resolution, it was a situation where the person who felt wronged knew someone on the CWG personally and therefore felt safe bringing issues to them privately first. However, not everyone has such a relationship with one of the four CWG members, and such a relationship should definitely not be a pre-requisite to getting their conflicts resolved. So we need a diverse pool of people so that ideally everyone can find someone that they feel comfortable talking to in it.

Like the security team, I don't think the community team goes actively "looking for trouble." But if they stumble across an issue, or if someone pings them directly asking for help, they would jump in at that point and try and diffuse the situation.

Then the CWG itself would act as people seem to be naturally treating it anyway: a point of escalation for "nuclear" bad problems (a core committer going off the rails and telling people to stick their heads in microwaves, death threats, etc.) and/or extremely sensitive issues where confidentiality is an absolute must.

I'm interested in being involved in any way I can help out.

Hi,

As we are looking to place more issues describing the governance of the CWG here (as opposed to the actual activity of the CWG), I’d like to do some “tidying up”.

Would anyone above be opposed to me closing this issue as "Closed (fixed)", now that we have expanded the CWG somewhat?

Thanks

Rachel, CWG

I don't object.

Well, we did add two more people recently and that has helped a lot.

Closing as fixed.