[python-committers] Moderation of the Python community

[Brian Curtin]

On Wed, Oct 17, 2018 at 8:04 AM Victor Stinner <vstinner at redhat.com> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I see more and more discussions about the moderation of the Python
> community.
>
> There is a PSF "conduct" Working Group:
> https://wiki.python.org/psf/ConductWG/Charter
>
> I noticed the following questions:
>
> * Lack of transparency on how moderation is decided
> * Lack of transparency on the number of received Code of Conduct
> incidents: maybe start to produce "Code of Conduct transparency
> report"? (If such reports already exist, I'm sorry, I wasn't aware
> :-))
> * Should the PSF conduct-WG handle conflicts between core developers?
>
> Would it be possible to write down rules to formalize the moderation?
>

Yes. For any medium applying a code of conduct there should be some
guidelines applicable to said medium for how things are handled.

To get this out of the way early, as the author of the current CoC, it
intentionally doesn't prescribe any specific moderation because it depends
on how and where it's applied given the people and tools available.
Moderating Discourse might be different than moderating a mailing list
which is different than a bug tracker.


> For example:
>
> * First try to contact the author of an incident and warn them? Only
> take an action immediately for exceptional cases like obvious spam?
> * Maybe define numbers for ban: 1 week, then 3 months, then 6 months,
> then 1 year? I would prefer to never ban someone forever. People can
> change.
> * Scope: does the moderationg apply to *any* public space? Or only to
> a restricted list like: mailing lists and bug tracker? What about
> Twitter and conferences?
>

For conferences, there are specific codes of conduct and applicable event
handling guides that go with them, and I would just leave that area alone
from this angle. I don't know that we should start meddling with
conferences; leave that up to organizers who are dedicated to that and in
several cases have actual training on this topic.

Twitter can't even moderate itself, but I don't think that makes it anyone
here's job.

I would scope moderation to any spaces provided by or for this group, so
tracker, mailing lists, GitHub, Discourse, and I think that's it? I don't
really know if IRC and Zulip are still in play.

* Should the incidents which occur in the private space be handled as
> well? Bullying can occur in the private space.
>

We can't police everything, but I think handling private issues within the
space of PSF resources (or whatever the governing body of what we're
talking about is) is to be expected. For example, if I harass you via a
private message on Discourse, that is a situation to be handled here. It
doesn't need to go to everyone's inbox for it to be a problem we need to
handle.

I don't know that you can moderate other private things—private in the
meaning of "PSF provided or not"—though. If I send you an inappropriate
email just between you and I, that's between us and our email providers. I
think it might be overstepping this group's bounds for you to say I can't
use the bug tracker for a month due to something I did entirely outside of
the scope of said group. It feels similar to some corporate policies, where
if I'm inappropriate to you when I see you at the grocery store, that's not
really the company's problem, but if I'm like that at our team dinner then
it is a problem.

There probably does exist some threshold where out-of-scope behavior
crosses to where someone isn't welcome, but I don't know that it's
generally quantifiable. That's probably something for a council or triad or
working group to discuss on a case-by-case basis as it's above and beyond a
reasonable range of behaviors that this group can have their eye on.

* How to handle conflict between core developers? Not directly related
> to the code of conduct.
>

If it's not CoC related conflict, do you mean conflict related to code, as
in technical conflict over implementation details? I think we naturally
have a few mediators in this case depending on the level of where it
occurs. Release managers, delegates for PEPs, code area experts, and then I
think there are a few who act in such a way due to longevity with the
project.

If we're looking for people to be specifically identified as mediators, we
have a bunch of good ones around here.

I'm not interested for work on such rules. I'm not sure neither if
> it's the role of the Python core developers to propose something.
> Maybe the PSF conduct WG should propose something, or even decide
> directly?
>

Is anyone from this group on said working group? If not, I don't think they
should be wholesale deciding guidelines for a group they're not a part of.
They would seem to be a group of people we should work with as they've
presumably come up with other guidelines and could be a useful set of
people to help shape things.


> Handling conflicts between core developers is the most difficult
> question. I don't think that it's the role of the conduct working
> group to handle that. Moreover, the Code of Conduct should be seen as
> a way to evict a core developer out of Python. The Code of Conduct is
> supposed to protect members of the Python community against people who
> misbehave. But I'm unable to describe the limit between "misbehave"
> and "conflict" between two developers.
>

It is unfortunate that conflict—which can be a healthy thing for a team—is
potentially reaching past this toward misbehavior. A lot of developers,
especially those of us involved in open source, come into this type of work
with strong opinions. When they're too strongly held, we can go beyond
productive conflict and end with one or more of us finding ways of avoiding
that topic (work on other areas), avoiding further conflict at all (only
work on easier bugs), and possibly onto misbehavior, none of which are
healthy for the team.

I think this type of issue is better solved internally to our team, perhaps
via some form of mediator(s) I mentioned earlier, rather than involving a
wholly external group. Time is of course a finite resource in open source,
and people work is often/usually harder than code work, but I think we do
have some people around who care about the success of the project to spend
time mediating these kinds of conflicts so that we keep everyone involved
and solve whatever problem at hand in a satisfactory manner.

My main concern is that the PSF conduct WG should not be seen as a
> threat to core developers.
>

I don't think it should be used that way, but I also know nothing about it
and have heard nothing from it.
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