Attachment 'ah-bof-2017.txt'
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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.
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