This issue probably needs to be split up into something more actionable, but brain-dumping some stuff here for now as a starting point.

We (@heyrocker, @YesCT, @becw, @bwinett, and a few others whose handles are escaping me atm) had a great discussion at #pnwds in response to @heyrocker's keynote about what is and isn't working with the CWG right now. Broadly, this feedback fell into 2 categories:

The role of CWG in conflicts

Right now, the wording around the Incident Report Form at https://www.drupal.org/governance/community-working-group/incident-report basically directs people (via https://www.drupal.org/conflict-resolution) to to sort things out themselves first, with help if necessary, prior to contacting the CWG (we recently adjusted the wording here for #2324067: Accept reports about non-intractable incidents but the overall text still reads like that, and we never announced widely to e.g. g.d.o/governance that that change happened, so people generally still assume that's how it still works).

It was pointed out that if you're at the point where you're ready to report something to CWG, you most likely already tried and failed to solve it yourself, since that's obviously what rational people will try first. :) Or sometimes, you really can't confront the other person, because they're a really big-name community member and there's an enormous power imbalance, or because you feel physically threatened, or what have you.

And while the CWG is empowered to carry big sticks and use them when necessary, often the first step of a conflict resolution is someone saying "I'm way over my head on how to resolve this myself, and I need help" In 98% of "non-nuclear" cases, what's needed from the CWG is much more of a "mediation/mentoring" role than a "smackdown" role. But because we defer mediation/mentoring to "pre-CWG" via the Conflict Resolution Process, we leave people between a rock and a hard place, so they end up both not resolving the conflict themselves (because they don't have the tools) and not reporting the problem because they don't want to "get someone in trouble."
I think this is totally fair feedback, and something we should try and act on. We need to do some hard thinkering on how to balance the reality that the CWG is a team of 4 volunteers, all of whom have multiple other obligations in the project, with the reality that we're not currently serving the community in the best way, nor even in a sustainable way (e.g. "teaching people to fish"). Unfortunately our last attempt at getting more help #2299091: [meta] Seeking input into the role of a Community Working Group Team didn't net us many folks who'd be able to increase our scale, but we can always try again, or try something different. Ideas very welcome.

Some specific suggestions for improvements to the form to encourage more reports (which give us a better picture on the overall health of Drupal's community) were:

- Have a set of radios for like "I already talked to this person and tried to work it out" / "I didn't talk to this person and try and work it out and here's why" to better understand where the conflict resolution process if falling down, when it is.
- Make it clear that "just FYI; no action needed" is a valid status for a report. Maybe this is a select box for "desired outcome" that includes things like that, "Non-urgent, but needs response," or "OMG nuclear critical, send help now!"

Concrete examples/scripts/etc. to help community members help themselves

One of @heyrocker's frustrations with the existing Code of Conduct is it doesn't, along with the general guidelines, spell out one or two specific examples of "bad behaviour" we're trying to avoid (and/or conversely, "good behaviour" we're trying to encourage). "Common sense" is not all that common, especially when a community is as diverse as ours in terms of geographic location, gender, grasp of the English language, etc. My main concern with this is various experience with people who just looooooove to find loopholes in "rules" but at the same time I agree that this is a significant issue, so we can probably try and figure something out.

Additionally, it's pretty easy as well to make (or ideally borrow from elsewhere) a "cheat sheet" about what to do / what not to do when you've just stepped on someone's foot (metaphorically speaking). Having some practical, accessible advice like this for various common scenarios that come up (as opposed to full-blown reams of PDFs which are really better training materials for CWG themselves, or the volunteers helping us) would go a long way towards giving people tools to help themselves.

Transparency

No one has absolutely any idea what we do, or if we're actually doing it, or whether whatever we're doing is actually doing any good. By design, the issue reporting process is private. This is necessary, in order to empower people to actually report issues that come up. However, the resolution process is also private (which is sometimes but not always necessary), as is any sort of visibility that meetings are happening, reports are being filed, etc. (which really doesn't need to be private at all, as long as we're careful about the level of details we're sharing).

The effect this lack of transparency can have is that people do not always know if they can trust the people and/or process of the CWG. So often times they will not submit the form, even when they really probably should (even as a "just FYI, no action needed" kind of report, if nothing else) because they have absolutely no idea what happens when that form gets submitted. Does it just go to /dev/null? Will the person they mention in the report immediately get punished somehow (this creates hesitation because they don't want to "get someone in trouble," they simply want the conflict resolved). What happens in a case where the subject of a report is e.g. an employee, co-worker, personal friend, etc. of someone on the CWG? etc.

We need to do a better job, not only in outlaying our week-to-week processes at https://www.drupal.org/governance/community-working-group so people can understand how we work, but also about reporting back what actually happens (without crossing any lines like libel, privacy concerns, etc.). Suggestions were to start periodic updates (maybe quarterly, to keep the volunteer time we have primarily focused on conflict resolution) that include generalized stats like "In the past 90 days, # of issues reported, # of issues resolved, # of outstanding issues, etc." In addition to that, another suggestion was requesting of people whose conflicts were resolved by the CWG to agree to being a "case study" (whether anonymized or not) so that the general public can start to understand the types of conflicts we have in our community and the steps we're taking to resolve them and how those might be improved upon.

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This is my best recollection of this 2+ hour conversation at 2:30am, so I may very well have missed some stuff, or misrepresented it. I do apologize in advance if that's the case. I'll ping the main participants in the convo and point them here to see if they have any additions/corrections.

Comments

kattekrab’s picture

Thanks so much for this Angie, and to all who participated in this conversation.

Do any of you have anything else you want to add or clarify around this?

webchick’s picture

Other suggestions from the CWG call today:

- Consider softer wording than "Incident Report" form; "Submit a Community Concern"
- Consider "out of the box" thinking for resolving conflicts with "repeat offenders" / overarching trends: bring in professional mediator, professional conflict resolution training for community leaders, etc. (no idea where a budget comes from but eh :P)
- A loose "Friends of Drupal" group of people who already do conflict resolution, and have some kind of mailing list for referring problems to them. Then we can "scale" people jumping in in a timely manner and putting out fires in the moment, as opposed to days/weeks/months later like we sometimes do. :)

gdd’s picture

No I think this captures all of what we talked about. Thanks for capturing all this Angie, I really appreciate it.

bbinkovitz’s picture

Well said about the rock and the hard place. The resolution of the linked issue left a gap between incidents that cannot be settled and issues that have already been settled, where the risk is that of silent attrition of the individual most at risk for harassment (and statistically this is most likely to be an individual from an underrepresented group already).

I agree strongly and very much support the emphasis and movement from the "getting someone in trouble" mentality among the community to one of fostering and facilitating conversations about boundaries and respect.

It may very well be that we as a community need to allocate more formal resources to our CWG. What can we as a community do to better support our CWG?

webchick’s picture

Just as a follow-on to the initial discussion, wanted to point out that I created a page to put minutes here: https://www.drupal.org/governance/community-working-group/minutes and started with today's. I'm not sure if it will be possible to back-fill a year+ worth of meetings, but at least from now on we can have this be as transparent as possible. Thanks again for that great feedback.

rachel_norfolk’s picture

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”.

Can you please describe what actions are needed to close this issue for you? Would you be happy for me to mark as “Closed (fixed)” now?

Thanks

Rachel, CWG

gdd’s picture

While many of the original comments are still applicable, a lot of other changes have happened since this issue was originally opened. I don't think this really has a lot of bearing on anything modern and can be safely closed.

rachel_norfolk’s picture

Okay, closing and referencing a new meta with feedback from the Whitney Hess sessions

Thank you