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Ombudsteam
The Code of Conduct currently says the enforcement mechanism is:
Instances of abusive, harassing, or otherwise unacceptable behavior may be reported by contacting the project team at [email protected]. All complaints will be reviewed and investigated and will result in a response that is deemed necessary and appropriate to the circumstances. The project team is obligated to maintain confidentiality with regard to the reporter of an incident. Further details of specific enforcement policies may be posted separately.
The bigbang-owners list currently has most of the same people on it as the developer's list. Addressing such a list may be an intimidating or ineffective way of enforcing the Code of Conduct, especially considering the lack of gender diversity on the list.
It has been suggested that BigBang have an ombudsteam that deals with Code of Conduct enforcement specifically. I suppose that's modeled on the IETF:
https://www6.ietf.org/ombudsteam.html
Good idea. But how would such people be selected? What are their responsibilities? What infrastructure should they use?
(Maybe the answer is obvious and lightweight).
We can draw on some of the procedures that the IETF lays out here [section 4] to address what their responsibilities are and what infrastructure they should use: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/rfc7776/?include_text=1
But the IETF approach of having the Chair appoint members of the Ombudsteam for a 2 year period does not seem like a good fit for us.
We could go for a grounded-community approach: i.e. start off with members self-nominating, or being nominated by the community, and with rough consensus/voting/some other mechanism decide they are on the Ombudsteam.
As the community grows, we can revisit and perhaps put in place more formal procedures?
A few questions:
- How big would our ombudsteam be, ideally?
- Is their job to take action, like deleting content or banning users, or is it to mediate and/or recommend action?
See #325 -- if the job is to take action, then the ombudsteam (or maybe at least one but not every member of the ombudsteam) needs to have Maintainer privileges (which have not yet been defined).
If the job is to recommend action (which actually seems more Ombuds-like to me--as a mediating body that can be spoken to without fear of direct repercussions, unless things are escalated), then the members of the ombudsteam need to be trusted but need not have other special permissions.
I think the ombudsteam can make recommendations (and the project leadership can enact those recommendations), but if those recommendations don't turn into a response, then that will make things a lot less effective. The model code of conduct doesn't describe how the response gets implemented, just that we all agree that there needs to be an appropriate response implemented for each complaint.
All complaints will be reviewed and investigated and will result in a response that is deemed necessary and appropriate to the circumstances.
I agree.
What I am trying to be sensitive to is that my understanding of the 'ombuds' role in, say, universities is that they are limited in what they can do precisely so that they can be a safe person to reach out to and to avoid any perceived or actual conflicts of interest.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organizational_ombudsman
My sense is that it's supposed to go that when an issue goes to an ombuds, their role is specifically mediation. If mediation fails, the issue may escalate into something that involves more muscular disciplinary action.
I'm not sure if that model makes sense in an on-line community or not. But I think there's something to it.
I think the ombudsteam is intended to have some separation, which we identified as a goal because you might have complaints that you don't want to share with the full project leadership or all participants.
But I don't see mediation described as an explicit first step or purpose. The ombudsteam receives complaints about violations of the Code of Conduct, investigates, and comes up with an appropriate response. In some cases that might be mediation of an interpersonal disagreement, in other cases, no mediation is necessary, but some action should be taken by the Core Developers (to remove commits, or bar further participation by a violator, say).
Dear both,
The IETF ombudsteam also has an explicit mediation role, it is one of their response options. However, they do go through proper training for that role.
As I am not sure we are qualified to do meditation, I am hesitant to overcommit re:what the ombudsteam can offer especially when most of the work is done online (as opposed to IETF/ICANN/Universities which have a big f-2-f component).
What we could do, is lay-out a spectrum of the kind of remedial actions we could recommend: from a one-on-one chat with someone, to barring them from the list etc.
Best,
On Wed, Apr 18, 2018 at 10:34 PM, Nick Doty [email protected] wrote:
I think the ombudsteam is intended to have some separation, which we identified as a goal because you might have complaints that you don't want to share with the full project leadership or all participants.
But I don't see mediation described as an explicit first step or purpose. The ombudsteam receives complaints about violations of the Code of Conduct, investigates, and comes up with an appropriate response. In some cases that might be mediation of an interpersonal disagreement, in other cases, no mediation is necessary, but some action should be taken by the Core Developers (to remove commits, or bar further participation by a violator, say).
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