Script for the video, version 1.0 20170807 Hello, my name is Laura Arjona, I am a non uploading Debian Developer since 2015 and one of the teams I am contributing to is the Anti Harassment team, since about one year ago. I couldn't come to DebConf :_( but I was very interested in this BoF to happen, so I'm very thankful to Ana and to all the people that made it possible, and to all of you that are attending and, I hope, participating. I'll explain a bit what is the anti-harassment team, or at least my understanding of it, I'll try to summarize the last year working in the team, and some challenges we face inside of the team and in Debian in general in order to improve the current status of things. So, what is the Debian Anti Harassment team? you can visit our wiki page to learn about it https://wiki.debian.org/AntiHarassment We are a point of contact for not only people seeing or being victims of abuse, but also for any community member concerned of creating a more welcoming and respectful environment in Debian. The main documents that we use as reference and we recommend everybody to know about them are: * The Debian Diversity Statement, approved in 2012 https://www.debian.org/intro/diversity * The Debian Code of Conduct, approved in 2014 https://www.debian.org/code_of_conduct * The DebConf Code of Conduct, introduced in 2014 (if I'm not mistaken) https://debconf.org/codeofconduct.shtml In May 2016 some people noticed that the Anti Harassment team could be unresponsive because some of the members were retired of Debian or in hiatus for $reasons, and then there was a call about this, and the team was relaunched with some new people, me among them. So you can see the current composition of the team, and our mail alias, in the webpage about organization in Debian, https://www.debian.org/intro/organization That's also written in our wiki page: https://wiki.debian.org/AntiHarassment What do we do? We usually receive a report of a bad behavior of somebody, or a violation of the code of conduct. We acknowledge the receipt We offer *listening* and a friendly word from the community (mail, IRC) to the victim or reporter. We gather information about the issue If there is possible mediation, we talk to the offender and offer it. Or we contact the offender and explain the behavior that is wrong, how can they improve the situation (our proposal), and offer help or support in making things better. We try to understand and respect everybody's feelings. Focus on the bad behavior and the type of community Debian wants to be. Then, we iterate, or close, or escalate. We try to keep the reporter informed. Apart from the reference documents that I already mentioned, we don't have much other resources to help ourselves handle the different issues that come to our inboxes. We have reviewed the wiki page which included some links to further info and resources and we have added some more, in the top of "Further info" section. If you know any other documents that can help the team members or any Debian contributor to promote a more welcoming environment or to deal with conflicts or missbehavior please send it to the mail alias and we'll consider adding it to the wiki page. But note that if we end up with a long list of links the wiki page may become less useful, so, help in curating that section, selecting the most adequate and updated links is also welcome. Finally, the own activity of the team helps ourselves to learn from experience for the good and for the bad and when a new issue arises, in some cases, we can reuse some parts of former communications in order to act quicker, and in every case, we can also try better than the last time. But note that for the good or for the bad we (or at least me) don't keep history of the activity of the team before May 2016. Now I'll try to produce a kind of activity report of our last year. I have counted about 40 "threads" or conversations since July 2016 until August 2017. Short summary of the topics: We have dealt with 7 issues, 3 of them still ongoing (4 issues about behavior in the Bug Tracking System, 1 issue about content in Planet Debian, and 2 serious issues about behavior of Debian contributors towards people) Only these 7 "proper" issues mean about one issue each 2 months; this is, in my experience, a pace of almost non stop because some issues take months to get them handled and closed. And we have more requests in between, as I explain now: We had other 3 messages informing about potential issues that didn't go further, fortunately. We had 6 messages with removal requests for the mailing list archives. One of them was "spamming as an act of harassment" and that was the only one that could be tackled by us (and the messages removed as spam, after some time). The others were answered or redirected to listmasters but no actual action was taken :/ We had 2 trolling messages, ignored, but demotivating. We had 4 requests from Debian Project Leader, Debian Account Managers or DebConf Committee about issues or people (2 ongoing because of the ongoing issues). Some other non-spam mail: some of them answered, and some other buried in our inboxes (for example, a request of interview about enforcing a Code of Conduct). Some internal communication, about 5 tasks that are still pending: * Updating the wiki page: partially done * Creating a GPG Key: proposed but undone * Report to the DPL or project: started on January, couldn't be delivered due to lack of team feedback, partially done today :s * Renewing the DebConf Code of Conduct: it was proposed by several Debian contributors, I sent a second proposal after working on it, there was consensus in more work needed together with the DebConf team * Enlarging the team or renewing some members that are not active, so everything gets done, and we have some rotation, for our own mental health. Challenges or topics to discussion Here I throw some ideas but it's not mandatory to discuss about them if there are other topics of more interest of the audience * Name of the team: anti-harassment puts some people in a defensive mode. I'd like a name in the positive side, making feel people that we care about the health of the community, about respect, about inclusiveness. You can do some brainstorming in the Gobby, I'll add my bad proposals there too. * How to strengthen the team (enlarge it, new members, rotation; also because issues are hard and disgusting most of the time). Volunteers? Who decides who is in the team? (last time was the DPL) * Probably after today, the team is more known and the number of reported cases will rise. We are a big community... even 1-2% of people suffering harassment is a lot of people and a lot of issues for this small team. Can we tackle this at team level? * We are slow. We try to breath deeply, measure our words, coordinate an answer inside the team, we have few experience, some of us are not English native speakers. Some iterations take a week or more. If there is peak of other work or life stuff, delays increase. * Delegation or not delegation. Currently we are a consultive "body". Some people understand Anti Harassment as moderators and de-escalators, some others feel that Anti Harassment would need more powers to enforce the code of conduct, and decide in serious issues. Currently Anti Harassment usually gathers information, tries to mediate if possible, and produces a report or proposal. * How to report our activity to the project. The format of the reports, level of detail, where to report (since our archives are public), when (once a year?). And I think that's all for my part. Thanks for attending; I'll follow remotely now.