 We are the community working group. Our session is going to be slightly different. We're going to blast through some of the slides, so we can have it more be an interactive thing where we do some Q&A, we explain some processes, and if you have any questions at any time just, I was going to say yell it out, but we don't encourage people to yell. I think given that we are the four of us and the four of you, I am going to go through the slides pretty quickly, but I think just throw up a hand if you have any questions. They probably do want questions to be asked into the microphone, so they're caught on the recording. But yeah, we'll go ahead and get started. So once again this is the demystifying the community working group, not decoupled Drupal if you were looking for that to be demystified for you. We've got something else today. So, community working group, we're a volunteer group of community members. I'm George Demet. I'm the chair. I joined in March 2013, sorry, I joined the group pretty much at its start in 2013, and I've been chair since 2016. And then we've got Jordanna from Suriname, Alex from the UK, and Mike from Florida. And then you see we've got a question mark, and that is because we are always looking for new members, folks who are interested in helping us out or joining our group. In addition to the four of us who are kind of the full-time members of the group who respond to and receive like kind of every issue that comes through, we also have a handful of folks who we call SMEs or subject matter experts. And those are folks who represent, kind of, who can provide some kind of specialized knowledge, whether it's, you know, language context, you know, we have someone in South Asia, we have someone in continental Europe. And again, that is an area where we're always looking to expand kind of our group to make sure that we're being as representative of possible of our global community. So if you do want to help out, but you can't like do full-time, thank you, and you can't do full-time CWG work, but you would like to help out in certain ways where you know you, you have some cultural, you know, you have some expertise in something. We are always looking for subject matter experts where you don't have to be full-time. Right. And it's not just like regional or cultural language. I mean, you know, we've had folks help us out with legal issues. Mental health, you know, communication straining, sorry, I shouldn't have put a candy in my mouth. Communication straining, all of this kind of stuff, it's so great for us to have. Absolutely. So what do we actually do, right? So our charter tasks us with maintaining a friendly and welcoming community for the Drupal Project, right? So in order to do that, we help resolve conflicts between community members through our established process. You know, we can also act as a point of escalation, mediation or arbitration if folks are, you know, having a conflict or dispute and are unable to resolve it between themselves. We're responsible for upholding the Drupal Code of Conduct. We recognize community leadership every year through the Aaron Windborn Award. So for folks who were in the opening session yesterday, Leslie Glenn was the winner this year. We've also given the award to Kathy Tees, Gabor Hoitze, Nikki and Nikki Stevens, and Kevin Vole as well. So that's a way that we try to recognize positive examples of leadership in our community. So it really is about helping making sure that all of us have the tools and knowledge and the resources to be able to navigate the community in as effective a way as possible. It is inevitable that there will always be conflicts, right? People have different ideas about how to do things. But as much as possible, we want to encourage people to work with each other to resolve those disagreements or disputes or conflicts in a positive and respectful way. And so to that end, we do provide resources, consultation and advice. So sometimes folks may come to us to say not because, you know, they want to report someone or something to say, hey, look, I need some help with a difficult matter. In fact, I think this morning we got a report which was very much that where someone was like, there are people upset in this issue and I'm not, you know, and I don't know how to deal with it. Can you give me some advice? So it's not just about reporting people because that's what people sometimes think. It's about like, I need some tools. I need some help. We do this kind of stuff. And if it is about, I want you to be aware of certain situations, but I don't really want you to do anything. That's very much the kind of stuff we would also like to. Yeah, absolutely. You know, and it's, yeah, so we, you know, again, we like to kind of joke that we're, you know, we're not the Drupal police. We're here to really help people out as much as possible. If it is necessary for us to, you know, take immediate action to address something that's going on, we will absolutely do that. But as much as possible, we want to encourage people to try to, you know, solve, have the tools and resources solve problems themselves. We also will talk about and share some of our experiences and best practices with other open source projects and communities. This is something we've been pushing quite a bit in the last year or so. I mean, in short, right, what we do is, everything we do is try to help improve the overall health of the community. So specifics. What have we been up to lately? So both at DrupalCon Nashville and here in DrupalCon Seattle, we've organized workshops for both current and kind of emerging leaders in our community to help them learn things like basic leadership skills and concepts we did in Nashville. Here in Seattle, we have a focus group that has been working both yesterday and today on just kind of some basic communication frameworks. We have a lot of different groups and subgroups within the Drupal community that don't always know how to talk and communicate with each other. So we're really trying to help develop a framework so that that can be better and more effective. In the last year, we also developed a code of ethics. This really just kind of put down in paper and memorialize some of the expectations that we have for each other around subjects such as confidentiality, conflicts of interest. What do we do if we encounter a situation where one of us might have a business relationship with someone who's involved? How do we disclose that, recuse ourselves if necessary? How do we make sure that when people bring issues and concerns to us, we're handling that information in a confidential way so that people do feel safe bringing their concerns to us particularly if there is a power imbalance between the individuals involved. This documentation is online. We have issue queues like if you have questions or concerns about some of this, we want it to be an open process. Exactly. And a lot of what we've done both with their code of ethics and with our governance has been really informed by this kind of public feedback from the community. So the kind of big thing we did in the last year was we changed our charter to improve our governance. So previously we had been chartered directly by Drees as the project lead. This was a situation that made sense at the time that the community working group was created back in 2013. As our community has grown and scaled, that didn't really grow in scale. It wasn't working for us. It wasn't working for the community and it wasn't working for Drees either. So we now report to a review panel and I'll introduce those folks in the next slide. But it's essentially the two community elected DA board members plus a representative from another open source project. So the idea there is that there is some with the community elected board members you have folks who are in some way representing the interests of the community because they've been elected by the community. And then you also have a representative who can bring in an independent outside perspective that isn't tied to the Drupal community. We now have defined terms and term limits. So we now serve up to two, three year terms. And we've also kind of tweaked some of the other wording in our charter to make it more explicit that we're not just an enforcement body or a conflict resolution body. We really are here to help promote community health. So these are the members of the Community Working Group Review Committee. Suzanne Durgachev, Ryan Zorama and Jono Bacon. We actually met with Ryan and Suzanne earlier today. Jono Bacon for those who don't know is he's a pretty great person to have on this panel. He literally wrote the book on open source community management. I got to meet him last year. He was one of the folks who runs the Community Leadership Summit every year. That's kind of around Azkan. And so we're really, really happy and privileged to have him lending his expertise and oversight. And to be fair, like we knew who the third member was when you got, when it was announced in the tree snow. Yeah, we literally found out yesterday morning when it went up on the big slide. They're like, oh, cool. They're like, oh, Jono, that's a good choice. So what are we up to next, right? So as I mentioned before, we're continuing to expand our membership and our subject matter experts. We're particularly focused on more international perspectives. Now that we are, our charter is moved under the Drupal Association, we want to find ways to better leverage that relationship in order to better serve the community. We have access now to DA funds to support our workshops. We have legal protection from the DA, which is really, really good to have. And we're really looking at this as an opportunity to do more proactively for the community. One of the things that we were also talking about this morning that we're working on is creating some resources for camp and event organizers around Code of Conduct Enforcement. We're kind of thinking of it as like a playbook with different scenarios for, you know, what to do. And we're also going and starting here today right now. You are the first to hear. We are reviewing and updating our Community Code of Conduct. So our current Community Code of Conduct, and to be clear, this is the Code of Conduct that's on Drupal.org and applies to the community and its interactions as a whole as opposed to the Code of Conduct that is here at DrupalCon for this event. Those are two separate things. The Community Code of Conduct is a, you know, again, it's not just about events. It's about every interaction in the community. It was adopted in 2010. The last time we made any major updates to it, which was to add our conflict resolution process, was in 2014. It is based on an old version of the Ubuntu Code of Conduct that they aren't even actually using anymore. And then over the last two years, you know, through the various community conversations and governance conversations, we've received some pretty clear and consistent feedback that we need to clarify the purpose and applicability of the Code of Conduct. You know, being more specific about what kinds of behaviors, how the Code of Conduct is applied, what the consequences are for Code of Conduct violations, you know, the distinction between, you know, beliefs and behaviors, which was an issue a couple of years ago with some high-profile incidents, and making it really clear that, you know, we are all participants and members of the community, but there are some of us who get up at the stage at DrupalCon or other events or who might have leadership roles in the community who have additional responsibilities that come with that and understanding what those higher levels of, what those higher expectations are. Making it really clear what the scope is of the Code of Conduct, particularly with interactions between people that may occur outside of the specific context of Drupal, one of the things that we see quite a lot, we see fairly often as, you know, people may get into conflicts on social media and these are people whose kind of primary relationship is through the Drupal project, but, you know, but the dispute or conflict they have may not specifically take place in a Drupal space and making sure that it's really clear that, yes, this is something that is under that jurisdiction. So there's a big long link there. We're going to tweet it out from our Twitter account so you don't have to write it down, but we have a Google form. We're launching a survey today, at least through the end of the month, to get more feedback from the community on what our next steps are there. So speaking of that Twitter account at Drupal Community, you can see it right there. We keep the community up to date through public versions of our minutes, which are redacted to removes names and other identifying information, but gives folks a sense of the kinds of issues that we're working on. We promote those via our Twitter accounts. Sometimes when it's an issue of kind of a certain kind of scope and, you know, public nature, we may issue a public statement regarding something that a lot of people are upset about or concerned about. We release an annual-ish report on Drupal.org. We have the public issue queue that Jordana mentioned before, and we do sessions like this, not just at Drupal. But we also are at different camps and events, and so Mike and I did a similar session at mid-camp a few weeks ago. Alex, you're doing a session in Spain in a couple weeks. So we really want to make sure that as many folks in the community have the opportunity to hear from us as possible. These sessions normally have ones of people. Yes, single digits. And some of the feedback we want to hear is like, maybe this doesn't make as much sense as you think, and maybe something else would make sense. So that's some stuff we want to hear, to how to make things better. Yeah. So at this point, right, so we have that kind of sample issue that I think would be fun to go through. But at this point, I think it would be good to take a pause and see if anyone had any questions, observations. Just want to say hi. Go ahead. Come on up to the mic, if you do. Or if you don't feel comfortable coming up to Mike, you can say something and we'll kind of paraphrase the question. It's kind of weird, because we try and make an effort to make ourselves as available as possible by out events, doing things like this, which are always well attended. I do BOFs at camps, but I'd say the vast majority of the feedback or the questions we get are often just one-on-one. Which is fine. And that's fine. You can always just come up to us. But David has a question. I was just going to agree. I think these don't make sense. As someone who's done them as well, it's always like five people show up, and it takes up a session slot. So maybe there's a better idea, whether it's something at the exhibit hall stage or something that's just independent, whereas you know it's a small area and you're not taking a slot from someplace else. That might make more sense. But I agree there's also, it's good to make sure you're all in the same place and people can ask you questions. I think we just might need a different solution. The Drupal.org ones are the same way. It's like a lot of these. It's like five people show up to these things. It's almost like in a sense we want to document that we are making ourselves as available as possible to the community. One of the ways of doing that is by having a session with Drupal. I agree with you completely. I mean this could be in a tiny little room. Or maybe it would make more sense to do a booth or something. We are open to suggestions. There's a boss space maybe. That's not taken up in smaller areas. Yeah I think from my perspective it's tricky because it's like we want to have the opportunity to have conversations that are not just like us on stage looking down on everyone. But also we do have some information and update that we also want to make sure people are aware of. I think this is definitely something to keep exploring. Thank you. So do we want to just dive in on this issue? So we took an example issue out of our public minutes. This is going to be the part where we're going to kind of talk about this but we have to be really careful because we don't want to for anyone who might have some awareness or might not have some awareness. So this is what this is. We're going to use gender neutral pronouns and everything. This is for confidentiality for us is really important. And it's both for the person who has had a report made about them as well as for the folks who are bringing their concerns to the CWG. So we want to make sure that people can bring concerns, let us know and feel safe doing so. Understand that we're going to treat that with confidentiality so that there won't be a backlash or retribution or something like that. Because we know that that's a really big way that people if they think they don't bring stuff to us if they're worried about the person finding out or someone else finding out and engaging in retribution. So this one was interesting. So last summer we received several reports about a community member and their behavior at in-person events. And particularly with regard to things that they were saying and doing at after parties, right? After our social events. So I'm going to interject quickly because I want to highlight something. Sometimes people we hear it a lot. They don't want to file a report because they don't want to make a big deal or they don't want to get... Do we have a way of reporting to us where you want to make us aware of something but not to necessarily take action? Because you want to make this happen and I think you should be aware of it because if it's happening more, it's a big thing. But if it's this one-off event, it's okay. Because if nobody reports these things nobody's going to... We can't see if this is a pattern of behavior if this is something we should be concerned about or not. So we had received a heads-up report of that nature. Hey, no action necessary wanted to let you know that this thing happened. Right? So we're like, okay, we'll take... Thank you for your report. We will put that in our record. We then subsequently received a couple of other reports that had to do... Well, we received, I think, both formal and informal reports. And we received a formal report that was specifically related to a specific incident at an event. It was from someone who had observed behavior and was in a position to speak with us about it. The informal report we received was a combination of sort of, I'm aware of these things that happen to other people. So it was a third-hand report. And some of the things in that third-hand report concerned us greatly. But because it was third-hand, we didn't have any way to speak with the person who was involved or validated or anything. So, based on what we had, we definitely felt it was important to have a talk with this person. And so, that's what Giordano and I did. We reached out, we spoke with people who were like, hey, you should know, these things are going on. These reports have been made. So we spoke with this person. We had the knowledge that, yeah, you know, sometimes... To be clear, what he means, these things were vague. But it looked like it could be something bigger. But we didn't know exactly what. So when we talked to this person, we couldn't be more direct like, you did this. But we wanted to make sure that maybe this talk would be a good thing to figure out. Sometimes people aren't aware they're making other people talk. So we felt it was a pretty good conversation. The person was listening to us, was hearing our feedback, was very apologetic for kind of the specific incidents that we could speak with them very directly about. And promise to... Try to do better. Do better. And then... So that was sort of last summer, last fall. And then come around again to the spring. And this person went to an event. They went to an after party. They had too much to drink. And the same kind of behavior repeated itself. And so they ended up leaving us to leave that particular event. By the event organizers. We were made aware of that. And subsequently we also received a number of additional reports that from other people who were at the event who were aware of what happened that corroborated some of those previous third-hand incidents that we were doing some new incidents as well. So we very clearly at this point had a pattern of conduct. People get so good. We should also mention that while we do have an instant report form we are more than willing to talk to people on a much more informal basis. And even so far as an anonymous basis where in this particular case we had someone approach one of us one on one and saying I have some information but I don't want to be known. And so at this point in time only one person on the panel knows who this anonymous source is. So we are very flexible when it comes to talking to people. You put safety first and try to protect everybody. So I forgot one thing I realized in the little timeline. You and I had a second conversation with this person for the event in question. So we had had two conversations both last fall and this past winter before the incident occurred that the subsequent incident occurred this spring. And why we kind of say these things about we're trying to highlight these things about you can informally come to us you can come to us at any time. Because when how these other reports came to pass is somebody like people came to us like they said no. So this is that's how reports started coming in. Right. So the bottom line is it on that is like so now we had a full body reports documented pattern of behavior and conduct. So we met as a group Alex actually had to recuse himself from the issue because he had had interactions with this person in a different context. And so the three of us you know talked about it in a separate area on our Slack channel where Alex wasn't present and came to a very clear consensus that this person needed to not attend in-person events or hold community leadership positions until they could one effect you know we were sure they were able to change their behavior and to actually be able to in our satisfaction address the impact of their past behavior. So what we you know we shared this with the person we said you know this is our decision we are willing to check back in with you in a year to see how you're doing. This doesn't mean that like you can you know come back at that time we're just going to see where things are at and see if there's an opportunity. One of the things that's really important to us you know with I would say almost every case that we work with is that we want folks to have an opportunity to address the impact of their behavior and if they're able to successfully do so have a path for re-entering the community. So this is the whole thing when we ask if you if you do a party analogy when we ask somebody to leave the party we always want to have somebody await for them to come back if they address all of these things. So we don't like lock the door and throw away the key this is not something we Right. We do our best to not have to get to this point. Yeah. We don't like doing this. This kind of thing happens a handful of times a year a couple times a year I would say you know the vast majority of the issues we deal with are people saying rude things to each other in the issue queues or on Slack and you know those are much more straightforward and easy to deal with but we wanted to use this one as an example because it gives you a sense of kind of the thorny nature and the length of the issues we deal with. So understanding that we've got two minutes left and we've just dumped a whole bunch of stuff does anyone have any questions at this point? Questions, ideas, concerns, comments. Does anyone on our panel have anything else to add? No I was going to say the other thorny part of this issue for us is there's no this is you know we're not announcing who this person is in any of our minutes so we've struggled with this but what if the person did attend? That's a very thorny issue that we do not have an answer for Yeah we've been struggling with this one it's like so there's somebody who has been asked not to attend Drupal events well there are dozens hundreds of Drupal events around the world all the time we don't really have any way to enforce that other than that if we become aware that someone is violating a ban I guess be the way to put it is we can address that at that point we can say traditional measures but beyond that some camp organizers said look we don't want to inadvertently have people coming to our camps or speaking at our events who shouldn't be here and we can't really give them a black list of you know banned individuals that's not something that we've had a lot of discussion about it and I think where we're at at this point is that we probably need to bring in some legal advice to make sure that we're doing it in a responsible way because publishing names of people who have been banned have other repercussions as well and also bring in community thoughts like how do people feel about it maybe there are some ideas out there that we haven't thought of to address this but we have talked with people in other open source communities and you know certainly and no one's really that we've talked to has really figured this one out yet and certainly not in a community that's as broad and decentralized as Drupal is the fun thing is Drupals on the bleeding edge yay what's not great about that is we can't look at other communities and be like oh how did you solve this problem because they haven't or they haven't had to deal with these problems in this way so it's not good it's hard that's why we need community involvement that's right so thank you all for coming if you want to know more and in a different way come find us and then approachable and we can talk absolutely you won't get in trouble thank you thank you