Code of Conduct and Reporting Guidelines RC1 -- membership vote.

As has been pointed out, it has taken some time to create a Code of Conduct and Reporting Guidelines. A lot of work went into incorporating critical feedback and suggestions and various examples were consulted. Still, there is room for improvement. My hope is that people will vote "Agree" if they feel these are "good enough" to adopt at this point, understanding that they will need to be revised as we put them into practice.

Definitely not a blocker, just a clarification, but can anyone elaborate on the "Stewards" that are referred to in the reporting guidelines? I know I am not well-informed on what's happening here in Loomio but I don't think I've seen that role defined anywhere.

(edited to add) Thanks to everyone who worked on this, it's important work and it's apparent that you put a lot of care and effort into the process.

The CWG or relevant subgroup is going to have to figure out the best way to organize the work. Stewards is language from the Enspiral code, I believe. Really, it should be in brackets as an aspirational placeholder for "the people who will do that work."

Hey @mattnoyes, I think due to the recent issues around moderation this is an Urgent Matter and the time for this proposal should be reduced to just 3 days (another 51 hours from now)

/cc @mayel / @matthewcropp (or someone with admin power to reduce the time)

Agreed. We don't have the luxury of time now

The time was reduced and the urgente header added per the bylaws. It was scheduled to close in 5 days. (Now 2)

It's extremely frustrating to me that suggestions along the lines of making "diverse political opinions" explicitly protected and removing all explicit language around which marginalized groups can expect to be defended here was relegated to a completely inadequate footnote. I remember arguing against this change in a prior draft, but it seems that several of the people trying to reduce this code of conduct's value to marginalized people got their way in the end.

It's absolutely ridiculous that the draft has been allowed to be shaped this way, and if this is the draft that passes, it's unlikely to make anyone outside this instance feel better about this organization, what it stands for, or who it stands behind.

I realize that I was not available at some critical stages in this process, my life has made it difficult to devote the kind of energy and attention it would have required to argue this case, but I felt the need to express my frustration, disappointment and words of warning -- this draft is not good enough to renew the trust that this instance lost, and it's barely adequate as a first step.

The reporting guide is, in all honesty, absolutely horrifying to me. I'm not sure I could even begin addressing the problems that I have with it at this stage, but at the most basic level, the community working group is far too large a body to be receiving and acting on violation reports, and reporting requires an extraordinary amount of labor from somebody who may be actively experiencing sustained harassment or abuse. The framing that a report of a violation should also only be pursued as a "last resort" is going to significantly deter people from doing it. The process as it stands is effectively just going to silence or push away victims of harassment and is not designed for the kind of immediate action that people in acute distress will need in a delicate situation. The deliberative, investigative process is not appropriate for most of the more urgent kinds of reports, it's only appropriate for resolution after the harm has stopped.

We need to do much better than this.

Thanks for taking the time to give feedback Melody. It's really really needed.

The CoC and RG posted here are most definitely Release Candidates. With the small group of us working on it, we felt like we had reached a point where we needed more feedback like yours in order to make sure members voices were heard.

The concern you have raised about not making specific marginalized groups explicitly listed was one that was agonized over and was made because we didn't feel that it could ever be inclusive enough. Your concerns were definitely heard but may not have been adequately represented. I hope the next CoC candidate will better reflect the needs of the groups you have expressed concern for.

The 5 of us that were able to meet on a video call to discuss the last iteration of the CoC and RG before releasing this version as the first release candidate tried our best, but it is clear we need more diverse voices at the table. I understand that it is not fair to ask people who are feeling the pinch for time/energy or emotional and mental capacity to participate in video calls or even in editing documents. I really like the idea of more of us engaging in one-on-one or small group conversations/toot-a-thons where we can discuss solutions and changes that would better reflect our collective needs. It's a big challenge, but an exciting organizational one, where we truly have a membership run CoC and accountability process.

So part of the purpose of the explicit list is a commitment and a signaling mechanism -- being 100% inclusive in a list is obviously impossible, it's also likely to be counterproductive to purpose. That being said, one of the things a list does is it acts as a way of saying that, at the very least:

"these are oppressions we understand, expect to be able to recognize, and believe we are capable of enforcing the code of conduct around"

so part of the value of a list is it allows people to see if their group is represented, to see if the creators of the code of conduct believe themselves to be capable of enforcing it along those lines, or are at least committing to try

by footnoting the list, what's happened instead is that information is now buried, along with a vague statement that the idea of inclusivity was more important than the commitment to represent those groups' interests

I agree with restoring the original position of the list and remove the footnote.
On a side note, our bylaws already include an "in-line" list:

including but not limited to gender/gender identity, nationality, religious background, ethnic and racial identity, sexual orientation, economic status, and disability status.

Let's put that list in-line as soon as possible.

Agree that we should include that inline statement ASAP and make a vote on an RC2. I don't think we should block RC1 because of the urgency and the long delay, but this is a key thing to include.

On this note though, I have concerns:

"these are oppressions we understand, expect to be able to recognize, and believe we are capable of enforcing the code of conduct around"

I actually like this framing, but if we accept it then we also accept what it implies. That is, if we are saying what we understand, can recognize, and believe ourselves competent at handling... we're also saying that anything outside that list might be outside our capacity to handle competently.

This is actually always true, it's just a question of whether we make it kinda explicit. So for example, if we get conflict between two sectarian groups that the rest of us basically know nothing about, how do we decide who is being oppressed? Even here in Ireland if a Northern Ireland catholic and protestant start attacking each other, it's really not possible for anyone outside to decide who's in the right/wrong.

I don't actually want an answer to the above, and I don't want to make it into a tarpit. It's not for RC2, RC3, etcetera to decide the undecideable. But maybe if we start thinking early about what's not possible to resolve with a CoC or even with expert community management, it will help us to frame a better one. Just thinking aloud and sharing thoughts, here, sorry.

People keep focusing on the list but it's barely a problem compared to the massive screaming gaping holes in the reporting guide. The policy that guide describes is hostile to victims of harassment and abuse, it needs to change urgently.

reporting requires an extraordinary amount of labor from somebody who may be actively experiencing sustained harassment or abuse.

How can we improve on this?

Last I checked there were comments in the docs suggesting that we formally change this to "use the Mastodon report feature", because we're primarily discussing Mastodon activity. Looking at the requirements on the report form as proposed, I'd have issues with it also.

This maybe calls back a little to what I said a little while ago, but two-way conflicts are naturally hard to adjudicate upon. Necessarily then, we focus mostly on one-way forms of abuse, where we're talking about the wrongness of the interaction, rather than the wrongness of people involved (yes, this wrongness can reflect on the people involved, naturally). So reports can, and by default maybe should, be "fire and forget" for the plaintiff.

If someone's being awful to you, as much as possible it should be possible for you to block and click "report", give minimal context, and let the software (e.g. Mastodon) handle the rest.

We should have a form for exceptional cases, but most of the fields on the form should be optional.

Would that be an improvement in your view, @meltheadorable?

Ask less of people, don't frame the whole thing as requiring reports to come from somebody directly involved, migrate the responsibility for investigation to a group handling appeals, or somewhere later in the process, make sure that initial reports go to a much smaller group that can act swiftly and unilaterally on a temporary basis for harm-prevention and sort out the messy parts later.

I would also endorse proactive silencing of accused accounts or instances in cases where the issue can't be summarily resolved.

Because social.coop isn't a dictatorship, we necessarily move more slowly (volunteer democracy, eh). Normally I'd be against proactive forms of punishment before resolution is in place, but in our case I think it's an appropriate trade-off.

The only hazard that I can see right now, besides bruised egos, is direct abuse of a proactive silencing system to silence people out of disagreement. But that's a behaviour pattern that is relatively easy to describe and punish.

My next question, maybe best to reiterate at top-level in this thread, is when do we start drafting RC2? Because it looks overwhelmingly like this will pass, now.

@meltheadorable To address what I think is an ambiguity:

My understanding of how this will flow in practice is that the CWG ops team (which is looking like it will shake out to 5-7 people, with a rotating "on-call" role) will be the front-line first responders to reports. As the Ops Team will be a creation of, and accountable to, the CWG, the empowerment of the CWG in this provides a framework to delegate to the team to make those swift, in-the-moment calls.

That addresses one issue, but the CWG being 50+ people and basically opt-in membership makes trusting the confidentiality claims made in the document nearly impossible. 50+ people can't keep a secret, and basically anyone could join the CWG in order to get access to the "confidential" details of reported incidents. I suspect that the CWG will need to be dramatically pruned or that the community ops group will need to be separate and then empowered specifically for this work instead. It's fine to have a large group working on policies, but not to have that large of a group handling sensitive confidential information.

I agree - we're discussing the ops team proposal in more detail on Sunday, but my sense is for it to have a closed space to deliberate and make its decisions, with consulting the Standing Jury, which is also a closed, limited size elected group, on cases it doesn't feel it can decide independently.

So, ideally something would only be processed at the "open community" level in an appeal-type situation.

Whether upgraded to "Urgent" or not, it seems highly likely that the RC1s will be passed. The largest objections so far have not been "blocks", which would be the only likely way to prevent them.

But, those objections are serious, particularly surrounding the data/exposure intensive reporting system based on a form, per @meltheadorable's thread. So there's clearly already a list of issues to address in RC2.

May I suggest that the CWG commence work on RC2 presumptively? :)

Hi Cathal, I would say, based on experience, that anyone who calls for a new version is thereby volunteering to write it. If you are ready to do that and others are ready, too, then by all means.

I get the point here is of encouraging people to volunteer to do important work. I suggest framing that as opt-out, as in: "Great points! I'd like you to please start the process for immediately drafting the updated next version. Ok?"

That pulls someone in and lets them opt-out still. And it doesn't spread the message of "don't speak up if you don't have time to volunteer". So, for example, @meltheadorable has extremely valuable input and points here, and the last thing we'd want is to discourage that just because she may not have bandwidth to volunteer further.

Sorry -- that was an expression of frustration. I agree with your re-framing.

@iansmith Did you see this proposal? https://www.loomio.org/d/tZd5gIS1/permanent-federation-policy-proposal It is intended to fill that gap.