Code of Conduct

This clarity is why in the Snowdrift.coop CoC (which I've mentioned here elsewhere and isn't the currently-proposed one to adopt here, as I wasn't involved earlier), we flat out say that sexual anything is inappropriate. In the case of Snowdrift.coop, there's no place for anything sexual because it's always off-topic even if it's wanted. It doesn't belong in our community at all.

I'm not sure about Social.coop though, it might cover a broad enough scope that sexual comments are ever relevant, though I don't currently see why it would be.

Re: the "on another instance" part, that's an interesting dilemma. I guess the point is to explicitly say that the CoC applies to all uses of the social.coop account? I mean, clearly it wouldn't be only applicable to posts at social.coop but to any conduct by an @social.coop account. Right? Would that clarity address your concerns?

I was saying, I think it's clear that sexual inappropriateness is covered on first offense in this CoC. I think if someone is inappropriate, this CoC indicates they can be reprimanded. What I was saying was that, if I'm wrong on that point please correct me.

What doesn't seem to be covered within the CoC is:

Ad hominem attacks, rudeness, casual insults, logical fallacies, and hyperbole

I'm not speaking hypothetically. I've seen instances where I think someone on this instance engages in hyperbolic ad hominem attacks based on (what I think are) logical fallacies. I respect people's right to believe what they believe and express their beliefs. But if what they're doing is attacking other people in an insulting and casually disrespectful way, this is not an instance which I can join. This code of conduct says that it encourages not being rude. It doesn't say what should happen if someone is rude. I'm looking for stronger language in that regard.

Thanks for clarifying. The Snowdrift.coop CoC certainly addresses the personal attacks and unconstructive criticism explicitly (and I've seen no other CoC as clear on that). I agree that most CoC's merely suggest being nice or not rude etc., they don't make ad hominem an explicit conduct violation.

I suspect that's because it seems to harsh to ban someone for more subtle versions of rudeness. But if we use restorative approaches to consequences as opposed to harsh, penalizing ones, then we can be freer to insist on higher standards.

At this point, I'm inclined to more boldly suggest our CoC, I just didn't want to disrespect a process that was already happening where I wasn't involved (coming in as an outsider and just suggesting an entirely different option). But I think our CoC is just better and excellent, and it was written through a careful process of considering all the others out there…

Digesting the conversation thus far, I'm having mixed feelings.

On the one hand, as we've been growing, the amount of time and emotional labor on the community side has been growing, and it has been made significantly more challenging by the continued lack of a fixed policy that I can refer to for guidance when issues arise (See: the Kaiini threat incident, reports made through the reporting system, etc.). The social capital derived from our common bond has allowed us to scale thus far through mostly organic self-policing, but I fear we are fast reaching a scale where that will no longer tenable. As such, the risk of an incident spinning out of control and causing damage now feels present, so even a rough, imperfect list of mutually-agreed-upon things to reference when dealing with such situations would be helpful, while modifications on it are developed and implemented as amendments.

On the other hand, it does feel like folks are raising some important concerns. So, if there is agreement with @meltheadorable's position that it would be better to be without a CoC for a bit than with this proposed draft, then I will withdraw the proposal on the condition that someone else step up to guide the CoC development process from here. This would include collecting another round of asynchronous feedback on the current draft (with the full membership this time, not within the Community Working Group?), then coordinating the next integration call (via a schedule poll followed by an RSVP check poll).

My sense is that, in order to answer some of @meltheadorable's process concerns, we need to have a constituted Community WG Team to actually administer the systems, as I am in much the same position on the social/community management side of things as @victormatekole and @mayel are on the tech side of things: needing to formalize an informal, organically emergent founder role so that the organization could continue functioning smoothly should I get hit by a bus or need to be thrown out on my ear.

I have not had, and do not currently have, the capacity to take on both the CoC process and the Ops Team organizing process simultaneously, so my intention had been to start that in earnest as soon as the CoC was adopted. However, should someone take over the CoC, I can move my coordinating energies to this next task, so I will post a schedule poll to the Community Working Group asking for volunteers. If someone agreeable to our community steps up, I will withdraw this proposal and the new CoC Coordinator will facilitate developing and implementing the next steps in this process.

Call for volunteers for the role is live here.

Thanks again for the work that you and the team have put into this.

I support this approach - if I were you I would make the check public and share on we can start circulating it to the wider group.

I also think that if it is decided to recall the proposal to give time for further improvement, there should be an implicit deadline that the WG brings back this version of the CoC in 4/6 weeks - just so that this doesn't creep on.

Finally - @meltheadorable & @cathalgarvey perhaps you can contribute to this next round of work on the CoC.

I'd like to, but certainly not in a leading role (I'm too unreliable, for starters). I started trying to catch up on the old discussion but found that it was very long, and consisted of a lot of calls scheduled with no clear links to meeting notes. Might have just been my poor skimming-while-walking reading discipline, though.

Having come up to date by reading the current draft and the discussion here, I'd be happy to get involved in future discussions.

I've mentioned this in several places already, but just to be simple: I am of the (biased) opinion that the Snowdrift.coop CoC is the best option and could be adopted with relatively little adaptation. It's short and too-the-point while also being totally thorough. It was developed over some years of work, studying all the other CoC's and drawing from real-world experiences.

And for those interested, we compiled a pretty-complete accessory page of communication habits to do even better than the strict CoC stuff: https://wiki.snowdrift.coop/community/honor-users

All of this is CC-BY-SA.

So, since it looks like things aren't so finalized, I'm happy to offer these resources. I care deeply about building the best communities and have put a lot of energy into this already. I certainly want social.coop to be a leader in these things as well and really succeed. I think this topic matters very much.

Please let me know if I should instead start a new thread somewhere else or how best I can contribute. Sorry for jumping in having not made time to engage as much before now.

My impressions:

@wolftune raises a well-developed and pre-vetted CoC for Co-ops as an alternative, which I do think is very worth considering. But if we're getting meta in this way, it may be worth considering spinning the Snowdrift CoC into a versioned document that stands by itself, and we can then share our updates and improvements to the CoC and state our adherence to different versions. This gets a bit "weed-ey" though so in the interim I'd suggest adopting some CoC and talk about versioning and consolidation later.

As to whether we should adopt the current draft; I read it, I think it's OK. I agree with @wolftune that we should not be more specific about what's unacceptable; the more you do this, the more you implicitly make it seem like other behaviours are OK. It's OK to provide non-binding examples of behaviour and resolutions as asides, and I'd actually like to see this to help people get the idea. But I don't think having an as-exhaustive-as-we-can list of forbidden behaviours is the right approach.

I have two general concerns with CoCs also, which I'd like to share. But, neither are sufficiently problematic that I'd block or vote no; I just want to float them for consideration.

The first is that CoCs should govern community behaviour within the community, and when members act in their capacity as members, or with reference to the community. But it gets a lot greyer out in the world where we all have other personas, activities, views, etcetera. People are not mirrors, they are diamonds with many facets; if we force people to adhere to a set of guidelines in all their walks of life, we either harm them or harm ourselves. However, of course we can't have members who behave sweetly within Social.coop but are (for example) leaders of White Nationalism parades elsewhere; they bring us into disrepute, they're clearly not safe people to hang out with, and their good behaviour here is at best insincere. All of which is to say; I think we should word the section on "scope" more clearly to cover that the "rules" cover Social.coop activities and representation only. But I also think that we need to address somewhere how we deal with "Donald Trump Just Joined Social.coop But He's Not Breaking Any Rules Yet".

The second concerns sexual conduct, and it's only a gentle reminder that the rules need to acknowledge that people are sexual creatures, and not all sexual conduct is inappropriate. If a couple join Social.coop together and make cooing noises on the main channel, it's a bit PDA and all but probably not an offence that we should sanction. Social.coop isn't a professional space, it's a social space, and people sometimes show affection in social spaces. So while dealing with inappropriate, uninvited, or inappropriate sexual advances should be a priority for any CoC, our language should remain aware of acceptable and invited sexual conduct also.

Again; neither of the above would block me from voting yes.
As to my actual vote; if we get someone to take over leading the CoC, I'd vote no in order to give more time to get this done right. If not, then I'd vote yes because we need a CoC short-term, and can work incrementally to improve it afterwards. We should mark the CoC as "beta" though in this case, to make it clear to new members that it's still a WIP and the rules may change.

I'm not sure if this is helpful at all, but I'd like to say that the call that I participated in last night felt really open, inclusive and for what it's worth, good intentioned.

I was not able to participate in earlier calls, but the draft document was posted for review and I was able to take a look prior to this call where I was able to familiarize myself with areas of concern and to me, the process of how this CoC came to be was quite transparent.

For those that didn't participate in the process, I can imagine it to be frustrated by apparent lapses in the CoC because we have come to imagine the governing policies of social.coop should be of the highest standard. However, let's also remember that all of these documents are being generated by groups of regular social.coop users who were using the resources available to them and from personal experiences. The more users with diverse experiences and skill sets participate, the better the outcome.

I think it is quite useful that new CoCs have been introduced in this follow up discussion as ones to potentially learn from. I have voted "YES" with the understanding that we will continue to change and improve on the CoC, as I would expect would be the case for any other social.coop policy being adopted in the future.

@meltheadorable, what do you think of the snowdrift.coop's CoC, as proposed by @wolftune?

https://wiki.snowdrift.coop/community/conduct

@meltheadorable any interest in spearheading the next iteration of the CoC if this version doesn't pass (or does) with @wolftune and others who may volunteer? https://www.loomio.org/p/QtOuroe2/urgent-volunteer-to-lead-the-coc-process-from-here

I like this a lot, fwiw! I'm appreciative of the hard work put in to get the thing this far - and I'm quietly confident of the community's capabilities in refining it further. I want this CoC to be approved of by everyone rather than passing with a minority who disagree.

This is much worse than the current draft being discussed. I could explain my objections (and might, if pressed) but since it's not the draft under discussion, I'd rather focus on the issue at hand for now. Suffice it to say, this addresses none of my serious concerns with the currently proposed CoC and adds another heaping handful of new ones.

@meltheadorable If you can spare the time and energy, explaining your concerns will (A) provide perspective given a CoC that otherwise isn't just a draft but is in use and where constructive criticism is always welcome and (B) probably be one good way to help everyone here gain perspective by seeing those concerns spelled out.

Obviously, the serious concerns you have with both the draft and the Snowdrift.coop CoC would be the first priority to explain further since those apply no matter what.

Thanks

The substantive issue that applies to both is the broken reporting process. For snowdrift, it just says to use the flagging feature, but the CoC presumably also applies to all the spaces that don't have that feature to utilize, or where it doesn't have feature parity between platforms. The reporting process needs to be well-specified, confidential, clear, and platform-agnostic. You can provide multiple options for how to initiate a report, but the meat of the process should apply to every venue the CoC covers, without over-reliance on features that only exist on one platform.

Addressing the other issues with the snowdrift CoC would be really time-consuming and I honestly just don't have the energy for an in-depth review of it right now. The short version is that it's full of clauses and language (especially in conjunction with the "honor code") that can and in time likely will be weaponized against traditionally marginalized people.

In general, the over-focus on tone and politeness tend to favor manipulative people who can navigate situations in which they are behaving harmfully without much emotional involvement (generally, the people who need the protection of a code of conduct the least) at the expense of people who are most impacted, especially when you stack on other social biases (sexism, racism, etc) that impact people's judgment of who is considered to be "rational" or "calm" or "polite" in any given situation.

I clarified above, but I just see these as two parts of a holistic system. A Code of Conduct is the statement of what conduct is acceptable or not etc. and there must be a corresponding process for handling it or else it's nothing but wishful thinking.

So, in the case of the Snowdrift.coop CoC, that is not the document describing the process. The references to flagging are because there are conduct issues around flagging itself. We have separate stuff for the process of flagging (and what to do in contexts where the flagging tool isn't available). And on that regard, it's still a work in progress. I have a long list of notes of things to do to finish designing our process, and some of it will require requests for improved tools. But again, where the tools are lacking, we still need to do all we can and have it specified. This is super important even though it's not easy.

I agree that the discussion about worries about weaponizing certain language is bigger than we can likely manage here in this context. However, I hope to continue engaging in that conversation wherever/whenever I can in order to listen and understand the concerns more thoroughly.

Our CoC doesn't mention "politeness" at a all and while that may or may not be part of healthy community discussion, it's certainly in the accessory suggestion area, not enforceable. FWIW, I can see how our CoC may unfortunately remind readers of a certain reactionary sort of tone-policing that privileged folks do when pushing-back on marginalized people's complaints, but I don't think we're actually doing that at all.

I happen to think that (especially for a general community like Social.coop), it may be appropriate to actually censor certain harmful viewpoints. The effect of carefully phrased propaganda can be insidious. It's certainly possible for someone to follow our CoC while still expressing ideas that harm the community. I'm just really wary of trying to specify those censored ideas in advance. I think this is best left to the process and admins. Which is to say that we can censor or otherwise take action on threats to the community or to a subset of the members without those threats necessarily violating the CoC. The admins aren't tied to allowing absolutely anything as long as it follows the CoC.

I think orgs should have clear mission statements and values (the ICA principles for one), and the process part of the structure should give leeway to take actions to preserve the values and mission. For that matter, would it perhaps make sense to have a CoC item specifying somehow that everyone is expected to have some deference to the org's mission and values (basically that people expressing ideas hostile to the core values may be censored)?

@meltheadorable a brief (oops) addendum: I've been thinking more about how things could go wrong as you suggest… I'm certainly seeing how that could happen. Obviously a community where the voices included are those who happen to be unemotional and skilled with certain forms of language is one that has a severe bias.

How can we make sure that marginalized perspectives get fully included (even when people may happen to be understandably emotional or lack skill or energy to do the optimal style of communicating)? In my view, this probably requires a mix of deference to including marginal perspectives (when they are in-line with the core values of the org) and actively "steel-manning" or other ways to help strengthen rather than censor those perspectives… and I'm sure you have other ideas and probably there's some mix of misunderstanding and disagreement with what I'm saying here.

Skipping getting into that (surely hours, days, years of complex stuff to cover), my real question is: what's an example of a CoC and a process that does work for these concerns?

We put together the Snowdrift.coop CoC taking ideas from others and making them clearer and more flexible, consolidated… Point is: I don't generally see other CoC's having elements that address problems that ours misses. But I wouldn't claim that ours somehow covers everything perfectly.

Rather than critique the items that are there, I'd like to see examples of what should be in a great CoC that is missing in ours or the draft. If you know of any or can write up some proposals, I think that work (finding what we DO want) is the most valuable way forward.

I understand, of course, that it's easier to see the need for something, i.e. diagnose a problem, than it is to provide a solution/cure…

It seems to me the best way to proceed would be to follow the principle of "Yes, and..." We have a CoC developed here based on a lot of discussion of the specific needs/context of social.coop and a CoC from snowdrift with features many people like. Why not add the best features of the Snowdrift CoC to the existing proposed CoC? I would be willing to facilitate such a process.

Regarding section 3, Unacceptable Behavior:

The following behaviors are unacceptable within our community:

The constraint "within our community" reminds me much of a hole that the Go programming language open source project had in their CoC, which they recently patched:

The first lesson we learned is that toxic behaviors by project participants in non-project spaces can have a negative impact on the project affecting the security and safety of community members.

Updating the Go Code of Conduct

We may want to consider unacceptable behavior outside of our community as well.

Thanks for the link to the Go Code of Conduct, another great resource for this process. About behaviour outside the community -- how do you handle people who are members of multiple communities, each with different codes or standards of behaviour? Our thought so far has been to think of it as a question of dialogue with other instances (or spaces)...

What a complex and hard thing to think about dealing with. So, this gets down to the extreme: if a rapist-murderer living in prison decides to join an online community and does follow the CoC perfectly well there… and somewhere else it's revealed they are also a Nazi… or for that matter what if someone is a really exploitive capitalist? We can certainly understand people just wishing that such users just get kicked out.

For those problem folks who are also non-sociopaths, it may be better that they practice behaving themselves here versus making them more isolated…

If someone's mere presence makes others uncomfortable such that the community suffers and good people leave, then it's gotta be some sort of hard judgment call about what to do. I would never tell someone that they should tolerate having their unrepentant rapist around (and forgiveness if it ever comes would have to be through a Restorative Justice process led by the victim to make them truly feel empowered and satisfied with the outcome). But there's also value to innocent-until-proven-guilty approaches…

I think at most, there should be room for real human judgment. Effectively, people not assuming that a CoC can cover every scenario. It should be clear that exceptional or unforeseen situations get dealt with by human beings listening and working on how to address them.

The CoC shouldn't totally tie the hands of moderators and admins. It's the norm we ask everyone to follow and support. It will never be perfect.

@wolftune I agree that the issue is complex. It should probably be stressed that Go's change to their CoC seemed to make sense to them given the circumstances. It may be a mistake to assume that we'd encounter similar circumstances; or that for us the solution would look similar. I shared it because, in my limited experience thinking about CoCs, the move seemed interesting.

I guess what was interesting about it was precisely that it was a response to circumstances rather than a foregone conclusion.

I'm all for living documents that update in response to situations. I also believe in learning from observing others (their situation arose, thus we can assume this is in the cards). I think we should anticipate similar situations, but while they moved to address it, I'm not sure they solved it or that a CoC itself can solve it.

Situations like this probably will arise. I've experienced similar situations in other communities I'm part of. It's most important to have something and we can improve it as we go. This seems like a situation where the CoC could be improved, but not a problem that would make the CoC counterproductive. In general, the application of CoCs is hard and they can be abused, so being process-heavy and principle-heavy rather than listing every condition tends to be more responsive and fair.

Situations like this will definitely come up. If this goes through another draft, we should address it somehow.

I wonder if, in the short-term, the operational guidance on these sorts of tough questions I seek could come from an elected panel of members, who could deliberate and vote privately on issues that arise so as to ensure they do not become a social capital contest from the start, though a member being disciplined by that body could appeal to the full working group at their discretion?

Having such a group would resolve my sense of urgency question a bit, so long as we have someone to pick up the CoC process.

@meltheadorable I saw you voted on the check poll to not put yourself forward for that role due to your strong advocacy in this discussion, but, if you change your mind, I would definitely support your candidacy.

Regardless, thank you for your thoughtful intervention/contribution here. :)

Alright, I've created a thread in the Community WG that can be used to discuss the "standing jury" idea here.

I have been @-ed many many times since I last commented here, will try to answer any questions directed at me a bit later, but I just wanted to let people know I'm still present and intend to respond.

Edit: Deleted and reposted because of a threading UX issue

I don't understand just how the Code of Conduct is meant to function in practice. For me, it would help very much to separate out the functionally different aspects of it, and maybe this would be a way to start talking constructively about the obviously different points of view expressed in this thread.

UPDATE: Good processes seem now underway in the community working group, both in relation to the CoC, as well as for forming a stopgap strategy for filling the role in the meantime.

I've posted the following in the description on the main Loomio page:

Community Expectations Our Community's Code of Conduct is under development in the Community Worker Group. In the meantime, social.coop has voted to adhere to the International Cooperative Alliance's "Statement on Co-operative Values," with which member behavior in social.coop spaces is expected to be in alignment:

"Co-operatives are based on the values of self-help, self-responsibility, democracy, equality, equity and solidarity. In the tradition of their founders, co-operative members believe in the ethical values of honesty, openness, social responsibility and caring for others."