 So next talk will be by Delhi and organizing the Beyond Face peer-to-peer facilitation training. So can folks hear me? I'm looking to IRC for responses because I will not have any sound from Jitsi. So just let me know. Is this ready? So I will start my talk. If you're noticing my screencast, I have an org mode file up just to let you know that no, I have not made slides. I am just publishing my raw notes such as they are for today. That's what we get out of a short lead time on my talk. Great. So here we go. And again, I apologize. I would not attempt to read all these notes. They're probably too small for you on your screen. But if they're recorded, if you want to look at them later, I'm exposing my typos for your benefit so you can see more about what I'm saying if that's helpful. I wanted to introduce myself a little differently this time and this is starting with DebConf 14 when I was available for the content team and the global DebConf global team when they were needing help on agenda setting for a meeting that was looking like it was going to be very difficult. We met over lunch. I made suggestions about how to generically set up good agendas. The next day I attended the meeting from the back and didn't really participate or have my name on anything. But it went really well and I was surprised they actually used just the generic template I suggested. Based on that and conversations after I ended up being invited for a keynote talk in Montreal on the topic of when do social issues matter in technical debates and when they don't matter. And there I had technical issues with an obsolete laptop I was trying to use. And so the recording has a lot of stuttering in it in terms of my presentation, but the content is good and you might be able to find that if you're interested. And the reason I'm talking about those talks is because all along I've been thinking about Debian as a community learning how to communicate better inside itself because from my point of view it's the starship example of what Democratic discourse can do. And the rest of the world needs these examples. So while Debian struggles with its own issues and publicizes those issues through completely open threads and on many levels. Meanwhile, this is an important conflict. It's an important conflict resolution process that the community is going through for itself and what it learns is helping others. So this has been my ongoing thought of how I can continue to help Debian with this process. So today's talk is a continuation that I was hoping to bring up more at Debian 18 Taiwan. When that was my intention for Deb camp actually and I ended up getting sucked into food issues that needed to be covered because there were translation and in my case important food issues so I ended up doing food team things which felt like a gender problem. Honestly. And I was angry and resentful because I really had this other communications work that I was wanting to work on. So that was two years ago. You know, I just want to let people know that this is something I've been thinking about. So today I want to talk about the possibility of Debian perpetuating its own internal communications training among its own membership, and it doesn't need to be just Debian internal it could be sistering with other, you know, outside free and open source communities who are also dealing with online communications and training each other so it doesn't have to be just internal to Debian but I want it to be Debian folks to really have an investment and be able to do it. And some of the examples that I'm drawing from are from community development of various sorts. I was looking for notes on such a group that I had set up for a co-housing community back roughly 2005 or six. And when I look back at my notes this week I saw that I had told them that they should learn from the software developers about issue tracking and that kind of thing. So that's, those are my introductions. Let's see here. I want to talk about, I'm going to jump around a little bit from my original outline here. I was also going to mention that I was available for the anti-harassment team in Taiwan. That's just background just to let you know that I have gotten involved with a few issues and seen what's going on from the inside in a number of ways. I've been paying attention to Debian since 2003. Something that came up when I was hearing the sessions the last day or two is when hearing about the communications team, I am looking at IRC, nope, they don't need me. When thinking about the new communications team, which used to be the anti-harassment team, seeing that that team will need to become more formal and meanwhile while Debian becomes more important, the issues become more central stage, more legal issues become more crucial to the overall reputation. And I'm going to see that, I believe I'm going to see that communities team get more and more pushed towards a regulatory role and by suggesting that there be more peer driven communications training within Debian that's not from a judicial, in a decision making policy setting group about what is and is not okay, have most of that nuts and bolts kind of work happening to help prevent those issues from coming up to that kind of level and end up needing something equivalent to policy, technical policy decisions being made on the communications policy because that is coming up, that is needed, but the rank and file need to be able to self-facilitate. An example I have for that is a story from another community that I believe developers should be aware of and it's large and it has a lot of literature and that's helpful. And that is the secular use of Quaker consensus decision making models. So I'm calling it secular consensus, secular Quaker because it's not from the society of friends necessarily and their spiritual communing that they do through, you know, egalitarian speaking from inspiration. This is more about a nuts and bolts how to run consensus meetings and do policy setting and do governance of important organizations and large organizations through this kind of formal consensus. It'll be called a number of different things. Meanwhile, within that community, there's this idea called facilitating from the back benches and facilitating from the back benches refers to someone who is not upfront doing something that is usually called moderating. It's not somebody moderating upfront. It's one or more people in the audience or from the circle who are asking questions and making comments that in fact facilitate the group and, you know, they didn't even need it. And what I had to tell them was no, you actually didn't do the facilitating because you weren't, you know, this is like a trial run for the training. And I said, actually, they saw that you weren't doing the steps that needed to be done, so they were doing it from the back benches. People were asking the questions, making the comments and making the suggestions that everyone kind of sort of knew were legitimate things for a facilitator to say to keep the conversation going. So this is the kind of math movement that I'm envisioning that WN developers could help engender within their own communities. It won't be everybody. Computer technicians often have a personality trait, prefer the clear straightforward or at least problem solvable communications you get from a computer and do not appreciate the thousands of different factors that need to be taken into account at once when you're dealing with real people. It's dealing with real people is much more complex than a computer. So there will be people who are good at that and they're not always very active in Debian now and might be in the future. So what I'm talking about is bringing those folks in Debian who are known for being better communicators and respected and appreciated and able to pass things on, at least by example, bringing them into circles of learners who are then passing that on. So here we go. So the concepts of facilitating from the back benches. I'm opening my horrendously huge org mode file here. My apologies. Okay. So here are some examples that I've written that you won't try to read I hope of ways in which a group can be made self perpetuating. So for example, so let's say you start with a small group. It's an affinity group style, meaning that these are people who have some affinity for each other that can work with each other. It's voluntary. It doesn't have to be voluntary, but I'm picturing something that's voluntary because that will make a lot of the hurdles easier to deal with. And for Debian it wouldn't make sense to be non voluntary. Actually, wait a second, I'm going to back up. voluntary is important because it allows the participants to support the group and know that each other all trying to be helping each other. If you force someone to go through such a training. Yes, you can force their presence, but you can't force their will to be nice and to help each other learn and get through this. So in the easiest ideal situation I'm suggesting everyone be voluntary. People come in with if they're all getting to if it's rolling admission, it might be different, but let's say you're all starting at once, then you're going to do a one month once a week. So you're going to do a four session training and you're all starting in the first week. So I'm suggesting people could come in with their original stated concerns or interests such as I have harassment concerns or I have moderating skill concerns. Or I'm wondering what are best practices in issue tracking communications that kind of thing. So those interests are what guide that participants study and also guide that participants future contributions to the group. Trainers may you might bring in an outside trainer, I would suggest first starting with people who are considered good at communications training inside the community. But the trainer's role is to set up each to hear those participants mentioned their interests and their concerns and point them to resources that they can study on their own. So it's a little bit of mentoring or tutoring to help those folks follow their own goals. Also, if everyone's starting at the same time, then that first session includes scheduling future dates. So the idea here I'm getting really specific, but these things are very flexible. The point I'm making here is that folks are coming in introducing themselves to each other saying this is who I am and what I'm interested in. But taking that not as an audience or a receptive students perspective, but take that from okay, this is an active participant that you're trying to take advantage of and make sure that their contribution helps this thing along. Find out what they're interested in and get their wheels on the road to actually making traction, getting traction and actually bringing back the results of their research into the group so we can learn from them. And then those presentations that they make later are just small presentations, maybe 10 minutes or less, depending on the context and the size of your training. But they're really just to get the conversation rolling and to point people towards resources that they found or maybe to get the group to talk about topic questions that they have about these things. Another thing to consider in this type of training is that you have rotating roles that people are actually dog fooding the process there. Someone's doing timekeeping someone's doing note taking someone's actually the facilitator who has, you know, somebody who has best experience available is the facilitator a convener which is somebody who actually makes sure the venue is available. Whatever that would mean if it was online. So basically you're splitting up a complex role into sub parts so people can get experience with those small points because believe me, having to combine time tracking, scribing, note taking, and calling on people and, you know, calling me to order those takes a huge amount of your brain and nervous system to do. So breaking those small things up so that people can practice. Now what I have is some content ideas. And let me see if I can find them. Okay, here I get a time check here. Okay, I see it. So possible topics. So let's pretend again, you have a group of people who've decided. Okay. You know, there's only three to five of us, but let's try this and see if it works. Okay, here's a recommendation of how you might start. Let's say you're going to have four meetings. In your first session. You're just going to talk about big per big picture stuff. Why are we having the training the importance what kind of resources are we going to use reading videos what have you. And then talk about some philosophy, some theory, you know, where is Debbie and in this stuff, why do we need it. And that way, because this topic is so broad because all these four topics are so broad people with their individual concerns can gear it towards what they're interested in maybe it's anti harassment maybe it's issue tracking forums that kind of thing. Second session concepts. vocabulary that kind of thing. Second session process. This is gets more implemented. Now we're talking about how does Debbie and make decisions. How does it make technical decisions. How does it make personnel membership decisions. Whether someone's a developer or not or loses their development status, you know, these are kind of like nuts and bolts of how we actually do things. But it's also should be about in the best of all possible worlds. How do we make decisions. So I did these kinds of trainings. I would usually focus on this CT butlers on conflict consensus handbook written in late 70s, early 80s, and he was encoding some quake secular Quaker process. In terms of what he observed in activist groups at that time. So it's a it's a very cookbook style book and I will promise to put a post of that up somewhere. But what I would do is say okay, this is Butler's version of the flow chart that shows, you know, first, you get the agenda set you have introductions you call for concerns. But what have you, you know, the other details of that. On your fourth session techniques, and then get into more of the specifics of okay now we know with overall process. What are things you do during different parts of that process. So how do you call a group's attention. How do you deal with people who are repeating themselves. How do you keep things on topic. How do you introduce topics how it's like a how to for the things you talked about theoretically before. And then repeat that cycle. Perhaps you have an outside trainer that's been a consultant during this process and maybe they'll stop after the four weeks maybe they'll continue on. So senior folks who've got a lot of history and Devin who promised to stick around for four weeks but they're not going to go past four weeks or maybe you know if you can, you'll have somebody continue for another cycle so people can learn how it is this cycle continues. And if you have rolling admission that people people can keep coming in. There's a lot more time, unless people ask me to later about about those nuts and bolts I'd rather talk about the overall idea. And I don't want people to get too specific and say this is the way we have to do it. Someone mentioned the Debian Academy idea. So here's something you could a proposal you could put underneath that concept that that general idea. This is in which this kind of thing has worked well. Vagrant pointed out to me that that I had forgotten that Latin America has a strong reputation for these kinds of literacy trainings, getting huge amounts of the number of the population from illiterate to book reading in the small number of years. Because you allow people who have got some measurable simply measurable amount of competence say your measure is this person has gone through the four part the four session cycle twice. They're now being empowered to set up their own. Something as simple as that can cause replication, not just self perpetuation, but replication where you have it branching off lots of branching in a way that is not a fork necessarily meaning completely different project but more of a supportive rolling out and delivery to a larger population. China did it quite successfully with barefoot doctors, getting herbal training out after decades of war, and we're able to successfully get many, many people the kind of first aid and health, minimal health training they needed. The example that I was first made familiar with was in the 1970s at a time when US and other European style cultures had lost intergenerational knowledge about breastfeeding. So women were relying on medical doctors telling them that formulas were safer. And when that scientific education became clearly wrong. There was a large grassroots movement to train for women to train each other on how to breastfeed and raise children healthy manner. So an organization called Le Laitier League, which I believe is French, just did something exactly like this in four sessions. You read a book together, and you had topics that were as equivalently broad as the ones I'm describing here. And after you had gone through a certain number of sessions, you might be empowered by the group to have the next set of meetings at your house. And this was, as far as I know, measurably connected to the very fast re-uptake of breastfeeding as a practice in the United States. You know, I'm not, it's only, it's about 20 minutes in. That was about as much as I wanted to say. I'd love to have questions because I might get some ideas about what more I was intending to say once I hear. And I need to hear that on IRC. Oh, so you, you. Hi, the question on IRC. Is there a link to the D-Lib project? I do a link to the D-Lib project. I have a personal web page that just has a link to a few talks. It's at dlib-rating.org. I don't know if you can see on my dlib-rating.org, dlib-rating.org. Again, that's just my personal web page. But I do have wiki and other Debian project access and I can post things there and I would love to work with people on Debian pages. That would be fine. Okay. Zafiq, can you show the link? I have it typed onto the org-mode file. I can put it on. Oh, okay, never mind. You're great. Okay. And Vagrant has posted the consensus.net on conflict flicked and contents O-C-A-C contents file. And that is, I believe, a GPL-ish version of the book. I was telling you about one of my students got it typeset and opened up. Can you show the slides again? What slides are you asking for? No, I was asking for the slides. It's okay. I don't know why they're not showing. No, they are showing. It's everything all right. How about ideas about possible ways in which Debian might use these information, this information? Vagrant, you said that you remember the cafe conversation now? Yes. We just didn't hear the last few 15 seconds or something yourself. Could you repeat? Say again? Could you repeat the last 15 seconds we just had cut off audio? Oh, you missed the last 15 seconds. Yeah. Oh, I was just giving a shout out to Wookiee who I had lunch with in 2004. Thank you. Here's a question I have for the audience and that is, is the community team the right place for working on this kind of thing? I would guess it is. An answer from IRC probably. Yeah. And I can be reached at dlib at debcomps.org. I found that that email is still working for me. Just another question. I understand you would like to organize a communication team and your info is organizing peer-to-peer Debian facilitation trading. Do you mean on making a manual for organizing a team like this and instructing them before events? I think that question is very important. I'm not parsing it exactly, but so I guess the answer to that is yes. The first question. I would like to help Debian and its ongoing communications training efforts. One possible way to do that that I'm making available through this is yes, in a sense, creating a training manual that I think that would be a good way to start. I like Wookiee writing. If people would like to work on this kind of things, I could pay attention to it and help it along. I prefer in-face trainings, so that's a difficulty, but so that in text is the next best thing. I think another part of it. For your previous question. My feeling is we don't have anything better. I like the community team to be a team of generally respected people that we know to care about such aspects. But it's an organization we will have to continue to hash and make better, but it has to self-improve several iterations. And it's a move-over, of course. Yes, that is the sense I have that the community team is a ad hoc team for so long. It's just now getting formalized in terms of what its real responsibilities are and methods and that kind of thing. So what responsibility it should and can have are open questions. I understand that doing trainings that allow people to train themselves might be a possible way for a community's team to have a role that has a large impact without being pushed into a more regulatory role. I think if the community's team doesn't do a lot in front of the public, it will end up just being the team of last resort as it has been in the past. And so this is an idea of how to be more proactive in a little less conflictual way rather than just being the folks you call when a problem comes up. Right, and I'm here. I'm seeing IRC now. Pre-training people could be usable to lots of teams, not just community conflict resolution. Of course, right. So you start with people who already have either very high skills or very strong passion to learn more. In my experience, what I see is that the mixes of people who come on their own to such trainings in the real world tend to be people who either want to get better at their own expertise they already have. They want to learn how this organization does something they know how to do elsewhere or they're having serious problems and either they've been told to go or they know they need some help. So you end up with a real mix of people who have skills and don't, which is actually fine. It's just they're all talking about the same topic. Bokeh is saying, what you say is interesting, but we're not sure what to do with it. I think a lot of us could benefit from training and communicating better. Yes, I understand. I tend to be very interested in Debcons because it's a place where I see real people learning to communicate with each other in terms of I think of everything in terms of communication. So of course that's what I think of. So I see real objects, bodies in spaces, learning who each other are and then either recovering from or adding to previous online communications they've had with each other that might have just been through code they're respected and probably maybe not even emails or IRC. Or maybe they just had a couple bug conflict conversations and they don't even know who each other are. So I see this real rich community coming together during Debcons. But doing it online, it needs to be a little bit more formal. And so that's why I would ask for a team to set it up. Someone's asking. So Vagrant mentions Debian already has many small or perhaps many two small teams. Should each team be offered and or encouraged to explore a set of sessions like this? Sure, I don't know. This is a kind of thing that Debian is its own world unto itself. And so yes, perhaps that's the case. Perhaps. Yeah, that's a really true. Another person, I'm X. I personally like the training system where you learn as you go and try to teach lessons. You just learn to two more people and learn some more people. The time they need to teach it is even more people and that time you learn some more. Yeah, exactly self perpetuating. If some of this info gets shared as online that could be more. I think that an online manual is really a logical place to start, especially if we get it into get or at least a wiki. I'm seeing flashing of information on the jutsu. I don't understand what that is. I won't worry about it again. The mix says again, so this could grow into Debian University. Sure. That's a reason why you might want to check out the possibility of doing it with other operating systems as well. There's no other communities. This is a universal need. Debian has its specifics in terms of its governance structure that will be different. That are very different, but working with other groups, maybe setting up a, for example, there's something called peer to peer. University. That is an online project and folks could from Debian could work through that. All right, so now I'm getting an idea that I really wanted to throw in. I forgot. In terms of different groups, each doing this maybe independently or with each other. A different proposal that I was actually hoping more specifically to work at in Taiwan on it Taiwan and didn't get a chance to work on was this idea of kind of a show and tell. So I didn't tell you about this. I forgot how much time do we have. Good, we still have time. So in DebConf Taiwan, I did a session that went very, very well, but it was unrecorded and it got some negative reviews after DebConf 18. Because it was unrecorded and because there's such a strong culture around openness and sharing in Debian, which is amazing. So if I did it again, I would have it, I would have, I would record it. If I went back in time, I wouldn't record it because I didn't know then what I know now. I think I made the right decision, but it did work and I think it would be safe to do it unrecorded. And I don't, I want to do this faster than I was intending. It's not just a software ethics thing. It could grow into a way of organizing lifestyle. Of course, yes, it is a lifestyle. So I'm not going to pay attention to IRC here and try to say this quickly because I had a lot prepared. So basically during that session, it was entitled, What Works Well in Debian? I recognized audience speakers when they raised their hands. My goal was to desensitize sensitive topics and get people who were struggling with previous wounds from conflicts that might even still be ongoing in some ways. And I asked them very difficult questions about what worked well and what they could use help with. The actual questions that I used are useful. I don't see where I put them in here, but they were along. What I did is I gave people ways in which they could answer the question that would put it in a positive sense and then ask them how they would ask for help. And I gave them very specific questions to answer about that. I should share that too. I hope I remember to share those. And the results were very, very good. There were people in the room who had been into very difficult issues. The microphone was passed out. I called on people. I asked just enough questions to draw out people who were being reluctant. And I said just enough to try to cut back folks that were long winded politely. And the result was that folks who had been on multiple sides of hard issues in the past each felt good remembering things that worked really well in Debbie and hearing from other people things that they didn't even know about that had worked well. And so what I was trying to do was set up this idea of showing