• attachment:ah-bof-2017.txt of Teams/Community

   1 Script for the video, version 1.0
   2 20170807
   3 
   4 Hello, my name is Laura Arjona, 
   5 I am a non uploading Debian Developer since 2015
   6 and one of the teams I am contributing to
   7 is the Anti Harassment team,
   8 since about one year ago.
   9 
  10 
  11 
  12 
  13 
  14 
  15 I couldn't come to DebConf :_(
  16 but I was very interested in this BoF to happen,
  17 so I'm very thankful to Ana 
  18 and to all the people that made it possible,
  19 and to all of you that are attending 
  20 and, I hope, participating.
  21 
  22 
  23 
  24 
  25 I'll explain a bit what is the anti-harassment team,
  26 or at least my understanding of it,
  27 I'll try to summarize the last year working in the team,
  28 and some challenges we face inside of the team 
  29 and in Debian in general
  30 in order to improve the current status of things.
  31 
  32 So, what is the Debian Anti Harassment team?
  33 you can visit our wiki page to learn about it
  34 
  35 https://wiki.debian.org/AntiHarassment
  36 
  37 We are a point of contact 
  38 for not only people seeing or being victims of abuse, 
  39 but also for any community member 
  40 concerned of creating a more welcoming 
  41 and respectful environment in Debian.
  42 
  43 The main documents that we use as reference
  44 and we recommend everybody to know about them are:
  45 
  46 * The Debian Diversity Statement, approved in 2012
  47 
  48 https://www.debian.org/intro/diversity
  49 
  50 * The Debian Code of Conduct, approved in 2014
  51 
  52 https://www.debian.org/code_of_conduct
  53 
  54 * The DebConf Code of Conduct, introduced in 2014
  55 (if I'm not mistaken)
  56 
  57 https://debconf.org/codeofconduct.shtml
  58 
  59 In May 2016 some people noticed 
  60 that the Anti Harassment team could be unresponsive 
  61 because some of the members were retired of Debian
  62 or in hiatus for $reasons,
  63 and then there was a call about this,
  64 and the team was relaunched with some new people,
  65 me among them.
  66 
  67 So you can see the current composition of the team, 
  68 and our mail alias,
  69 in the webpage about organization in Debian,
  70 
  71 https://www.debian.org/intro/organization
  72 
  73 That's also written in our wiki page:
  74 
  75 https://wiki.debian.org/AntiHarassment
  76 
  77 
  78 What do we do?
  79 
  80 We usually receive a report of a bad behavior
  81 of somebody, or a violation of the code of conduct.
  82 
  83 We acknowledge the receipt
  84 
  85 We offer *listening* and a friendly word
  86 from the community (mail, IRC) to the victim or reporter.
  87 
  88 We gather information about the issue
  89 
  90 If there is possible mediation, we talk to the offender
  91 and offer it.
  92 
  93 Or we contact the offender and explain the behavior
  94 that is wrong, how can they improve the situation
  95 (our proposal), and offer help or support 
  96 in making things better.
  97 
  98 We try to understand and respect everybody's feelings.
  99 Focus on the bad behavior and the type of community 
 100 Debian wants to be.
 101 
 102 Then, we iterate, or close, or escalate.
 103 
 104 We try to keep the reporter informed.
 105 
 106 
 107 Apart from the reference documents that I already mentioned,
 108 we don't have much other resources 
 109 to help ourselves handle the different issues
 110 that come to our inboxes.
 111 
 112 We have reviewed the wiki page
 113 which included some links to further info and resources
 114 and we have added some more,
 115 in the top of "Further info" section.
 116 
 117 If you know any other documents that can help
 118 the team members or any Debian contributor
 119 to promote a more welcoming environment
 120 or to deal with conflicts or missbehavior
 121 please send it to the mail alias
 122 and we'll consider adding it to the wiki page.
 123 
 124 But note that if we end up with a long list of links
 125 the wiki page may become less useful,
 126 so, help in curating that section,
 127 selecting the most adequate and updated links
 128 is also welcome.
 129 
 130 Finally, the own activity of the team
 131 helps ourselves to learn from experience
 132 for the good and for the bad
 133 and when a new issue arises,
 134 in some cases, we can reuse some parts
 135 of former communications
 136 in order to act quicker,
 137 and in every case, we can also try better
 138 than the last time.
 139 
 140 But note that for the good or for the bad
 141 we (or at least me) don't keep history
 142 of the activity of the team before May 2016.
 143 
 144 Now I'll try to produce a kind of activity report
 145 of our last year.
 146 
 147 I have counted about 40 "threads" or conversations 
 148 since July 2016 until August 2017.
 149  
 150 Short summary of the topics:
 151 
 152 We have dealt with 7 issues, 3 of them still ongoing
 153 
 154 (4 issues about behavior in the Bug Tracking System, 
 155  1 issue about content in Planet Debian,
 156  and 2 serious issues about behavior 
 157  of Debian contributors towards people)
 158 
 159 Only these 7 "proper" issues
 160 mean about one issue each 2 months;
 161 this is, in my experience, a pace of almost non stop
 162 because some issues take months to get them handled and closed.
 163 
 164 And we have more requests in between,
 165 as I explain now:
 166  
 167 We had other 3 messages informing 
 168 about potential issues that didn't go further,
 169 fortunately.
 170 
 171 We had 6 messages with removal requests 
 172 for the mailing list archives.
 173 One of them was "spamming as an act of harassment"
 174 and that was the only one that could be tackled by us
 175 (and the messages removed as spam, after some time).
 176 The others were answered or redirected to listmasters
 177 but no actual action was taken :/
 178 
 179 We had 2 trolling messages, ignored,
 180 but demotivating.
 181 
 182 We had 4 requests from Debian Project Leader,
 183 Debian Account Managers or DebConf Committee
 184 about issues or people (2 ongoing because 
 185 of the ongoing issues).
 186 
 187 Some other non-spam mail: some of them answered,
 188 and some other buried in our inboxes 
 189 (for example, a request of interview about enforcing
 190 a Code of Conduct).
 191 
 192 Some internal communication,
 193 about 5 tasks that are still pending:
 194 * Updating the wiki page: partially done
 195 * Creating a GPG Key: proposed but undone
 196 * Report to the DPL or project: started on January,
 197 couldn't be delivered due to lack of team feedback,
 198 partially done today :s
 199 * Renewing the DebConf Code of Conduct: 
 200 it was proposed by several Debian contributors,
 201 I sent a second proposal after working on it,
 202 there was consensus in more work needed
 203 together with the DebConf team
 204 * Enlarging the team or renewing some members 
 205 that are not active, 
 206 so everything gets done, and we have some rotation,
 207 for our own mental health.
 208 
 209 Challenges or topics to discussion
 210 
 211 Here I throw some ideas 
 212 but it's not mandatory to discuss about them
 213 if there are other topics of more interest 
 214 of the audience
 215 
 216 * Name of the team: anti-harassment puts some people
 217 in a defensive mode.
 218 I'd like a name in the positive side, 
 219 making feel people that we care about the health
 220 of the community, about respect, about inclusiveness.
 221 You can do some brainstorming in the Gobby,
 222 I'll add my bad proposals there too.
 223 
 224 * How to strengthen the team 
 225 (enlarge it, new members, rotation;
 226 also because issues are hard and disgusting
 227 most of the time).
 228 
 229 Volunteers? 
 230 Who decides who is in the team? 
 231 (last time was the DPL)
 232 
 233 * Probably after today, the team is more known 
 234 and the number of reported cases will rise. 
 235 We are a big community... 
 236 even 1-2% of people suffering harassment 
 237 is a lot of people and a lot of issues 
 238 for this small team. 
 239 Can we tackle this at team level?
 240 
 241 * We are slow. 
 242 We try to breath deeply, measure our words, 
 243 coordinate an answer inside the team, 
 244 we have few experience, some of us are not English native speakers.
 245 Some iterations take a week or more. 
 246 If there is peak of other work or life stuff, delays increase.
 247 
 248 * Delegation or not delegation. 
 249 Currently we are a consultive "body".
 250 Some people understand Anti Harassment as moderators and de-escalators,
 251 some others feel that Anti Harassment would need more powers 
 252 to enforce the code of conduct, and decide in serious issues.
 253 Currently Anti Harassment usually gathers information, 
 254 tries to mediate if possible, and produces a report or proposal.
 255 
 256 * How to report our activity to the project. 
 257 The format of the reports, level of detail, 
 258 where to report (since our archives are public), 
 259 when (once a year?).
 260 
 261 And I think that's all for my part.
 262 
 263 Thanks for attending; I'll follow remotely now.