 Conflict, it's just a kind of fact of being human, not exclusively human. When we're faced with conflict, regardless of what type it is, we kind of have a natural response, an adrenaline response, fight or flight, some say freeze. Do you feel like you're under attack? Do you want to walk away? There are a bunch of very natural, almost base level responses when we're confronted with conflict. I want to talk to you about handling conflict constructively, finding resolutions that build rather than destroy. Conflict is often thought to mean just big conflicts, wars, but it also means little conflicts. And we deal with conflict in some way, probably every day. And we've been doing it since we were babies, since we were in kindergarten. So we all have a little bit of knowledge that we bring to the table when we're dealing with conflict. Some say knowledge, some say baggage, for some it's a game, for some it's very real and very hurtful. So a natural response to conflict is avoidance. It's easier to walk away, to give up, but that's, I would say, not a constructive response to avoid the conflict, the issue at hand. That doesn't help build a better solution. So avoidance isn't a constructive response or a constructive resolution to conflict. One of those other natural responses is denial, this isn't happening. I don't want this to be happening, so it's not happening. So I'm just going to go and pretend it's not there. Avoidance and denial are kind of two sides of the same coin, I guess, as a response. The conflict happens, there's no avoiding it. And really you could say that history is the story of conflict. Now histories are marked by wars and conquests, but these are not the conflicts that I want to talk to you about today and have you talk to each other about, because this is a core conversation. It's not about me standing up the front and being the expert. I'm not an expert, but I am in the trenches, I guess. I'm the chairperson of the community working group. This is one of a number of groups charted by our fearless leader, Drace, to help the Drupal project. There is a technical working group. There are working groups around Drupal.org. There's a security team, which has become a working group. There's a documentation working group. The community working group is a little bit unique amongst all these, because we actually have nothing to do with the code or the project commits. We have, our role is to look after the people side of things. And it's sometimes when the people side of things gets a little bit friction, that the difficulties kind of arise. So one of the things that the community working group did was to have a piece of unfinished business on its agenda. And that was to develop a conflict resolution process and policy. We've had a code of conduct for a while, but in there it's had a little line saying we'll get around to this bit one day. Well, we finally got around to it. So I'm going to talk a little bit about that too. This was one way of resolving conflict, building a wall. I don't think whilst there was construction going on, I don't think it was a constructive resolution. Another way of resolving conflict, building artinals of missiles. Again, I don't think that's about building stuff up. Courts, these are win-lose generally. Don't often come out of a court case with a win-win solution. Often comes out with, actually, I think only the lawyers really win. Really key here is it's about challenge and about addressing the challenge. Challenge is at the heart of conflict. And I'd say that accepting the challenge is the key to finding a constructive outcome. Finding a constructive resolution is acknowledging challenge because really challenge is about testing ideas, right? When we bring competing ideas to the table, we have to test them against each other and find a better solution. And hopefully we're finding a solution that brings the best of those. Sorry, I'm having a little bit of microphone issue here. Finding the best solution is sometimes finding elements from those competing ideas and bringing them both to the table. Sometimes you have to lose a little bit of one idea and tweak the elements of another. But challenge is part of that building a more useful approach than you went in with. I really like this quote. We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them. And sometimes that process is painful and causes conflict in groups, in communities like ours, who are building stuff like software. So let's go back a little bit and I sort of say that the main way of thinking about conflict is the kind of tied up in war and bloodshed and all this sort of stuff. But it really also just comes down to much smaller things and the starts of things. And one definition that I saw was it's about when you have unmet needs bang up against each other. Sometimes the conflict can be resolved really easily by understanding those unmet needs. So you realise that they're meatable and then the conflict goes away. Sometimes it can be that simple and it's about having a conversation and being brave enough to have that conversation in the first place. So I wanted to kind of pause here and we've got one microphone in the middle of the room which is not great for a conversation but I think it's more important that we talk than that we necessarily record absolutely everything that people say right now but by all means feel free to go grab the mic. I want to ask you, what does conflict mean to you? Maybe there's an anecdote you want to share. Maybe there's a way that what does the word kind of bring up for you? Let's just get collectively on the same page about what do we see conflict as? What is conflict when people are misunderstood? What happens when people are misunderstood? They don't see the position of each other, they don't understand where they're coming from. Where each person is coming from. They may have the same objective but coming at it from different sides. Is that what I heard you say? Yeah. Others? Thank you. Miscommunication, big one right? Just thought you said something else. Yeah? Or you didn't say what you should have said, big one, especially in that avoidance and denial. If I get upset by something and go, just go away and fester about it rather than saying, hey, that wasn't cool, that made me feel bad. That can diffuse it and someone more often than not say, hey, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to make you feel bad but the avoidance, denial, you might go just, I don't like that person, they were mean to me but I didn't let them know that and they didn't have a chance to learn and learning is another part of the constructive part of conflict resolution. Good one. Others? Yes. That's a very good one. So making assumptions about what people are saying rather than listening directly to what they are telling me. Yep. And getting it wrong. Yep. Lack of trust, huge one. Yep. Anything else? It's about making choice. There are different priorities, different opinions and you have to make a choice about which direction to take, which side to choose. Yeah. Any others? Actually, well, I'm Ukrainian and I want to say you are wrong. I'm not really offensive in Russian in Ukraine to say that but it's really kind of offensive for people to say. Yep. Absolutely cultural is a huge part of the way we respond to conflict and the way we engage in issues that cause conflict. Culture, gender, all these things, very much so. In fact, the different ways we approach conflict is entirely cultural and in a global community like ours we kind of sometimes get upset with each other without really understanding or recognising that actually that person is behaving that way because of this kind of historical legacy that comes with them. They're not doing this to upset me because that behaviour in my world is intentionally upsetting. So we actually have to step back sometimes and go, okay, let's just think the best of people. It's easy to say and really hard to do but culture is a huge, huge part of how we respond to culture. I'd also say it's gendered that men and women and trans people the multitude of genders also respond differently to conflict and then lay a culture on top of that, lay a language on top of that and we've got this kind of hotbed of likelihood for misunderstanding, lack of trust, all of these things that we've spoken about and one of the really important things that we need to do as a community is just pause sometimes and take that on board. Our relationship with authority is another part of this. There's a Dutch philosopher, sociologist, dude called Kriëtof Sera. He has five different indices to talk about culture and cultural difference and one of the ones that he uses, which I think is really useful for us, is the power distance index and as an Australian I'm at the bottom of the list. I think the New Zealanders are even lower on this we don't have a huge amount of respect is the wrong word but we don't pay attention to authority and hierarchy as much as some others. Actually the Austrians apparently quite very even less into authority than the Australians and New Zealanders and then we've got, I'm trying to think, Germans are sort of somewhere in the middle and interestingly the Netherlands are lower than the Belgians and then you've got Asia and Africa who are like, whoa, this is like the most important thing if someone tells me no and they are in a position of authority then there is no way I'm gonna say, why not? I would though. If I think it's a dumb idea, I'll say so. The Koreans famously, this is a famous story is that some Korean pilots went down with their captain. Their captain had made an egregious mistake but none of them were willing to say so. The first officer, the other co-pilot were inferior in the hierarchy to their pilot and could not say this is a dumb idea you're doing the wrong thing and the entire aviation industry has changed their training and made it more like Australia's to say your role as first officer or co-pilot is to say if a dumb idea is happening. To take away that hierarchy, that culture and say we actually need in this situation to be a level playing field. So this is something that we also have to take on board. Sometimes you have to test ideas but it may feel really, really uncomfortable doing so. But when you do, do it with respect. Jess is a person I have a huge amount of respect for. She is a leader in our community and she will be working on things right down deep in core. I would feel like I could say to Jess, I don't think that that's a good idea but I would do it with respect and I think she would, I hope she would. See that it was meant as I think we could make this better if we work on it differently. But that also is dependent on the fact that we've built a relationship of trust. So whilst Jess is higher up in the hierarchy than I am, I could say that to her. She would also be able to take, she's also saying no I'm not, see? With this flatness, right? But maybe Dries. Maybe I wouldn't feel, I would tell you. But others wouldn't and I've heard this, that Dries was making a decision that made some people unhappy and rather than them saying to him, hey this sucks, actually no that's a bad idea. Everyone tells Dries, no. But culturally there are people who will just not do it. Dries is a figure of power and authority in our community and there is no way. Hands up who would have real difficulty telling Dries that that's a dumb idea releasing beat up this week. I mean come on. Jess, Jess would. So get the idea that authority and the way we personally respond to it is also part of the way we're gonna handle conflict when it arises. But if we do it with respect, then it'll go down better. You're likely to get to a constructive result faster. And it really comes down to the two sides of the coin is it's not just about this kind of, you know, abstract idea, but about both being respectful and feeling respected. Because that is one of the biggest causes of conflict is when I feel like my time or my effort or my contribution has not been respected, then that's the spark for a lot of conflict in our community. Now why do I know that? I don't know this empirically. I don't have fast data. But one of the things that happened last year is we had this community summit at Prague and a whole bunch of people got around the table and we talked about the kinds of conflict that we see in our community. And we kind of split them into two main types. There's conflict that's generated purely out of technical discussion, debate and tools. Like the way we do project applications causes conflict. Like the way we have to, you know, fine tune a patch can cause conflict. These things are directly related to our project, to our technology, to our tools. And then there's stuff which is the human nature kind of thing. One of my favorite ones that came out of that was the bad day effect. Someone comes into IRC and is just having a really bad day and calls people names or flames out about something. And then there are these ripple effects. Like people don't understand that that person is just having a bad day and it's taken on board all of this stuff and taken it personally and thought, why did they do that? I don't understand. But really they were just having a bad day. But the ripple effect of that bad day means that three people just walked away from the project because they couldn't handle that conflict, avoidance, denial. I just don't want to have anything to do with it. This is a problem. It's not that there's an easy solution to it, but it's one I think we need to watch out for. So in the community working group Stuff Online, there's a page where we listed out all of these kinds and all of these types of conflict. And in some ways I think that's a kind of resource. If you, and I hope you do, take on board some of the things that I'm saying and become agents of conflict resolution in our community, that we understand these kinds of drivers and we maybe add to it so that we go, oh, I've seen that pattern before. We can handle that in these kinds of ways. But understanding is one of those real sorts of keys. So one of the words that came up before about trust. I want to flip back to you about some of these elements, authority, culture, respect. What do you think you could do? Wrong question. If we take as given that we need to bring these things to the table when we see conflict. How do we respond? What are some of the stories that you've heard or had to deal with? I want to throw back to you. Feedback to me. Five fables of very good team. Stories. It's the worst place in terms of sales. Well they need to build trust in the community and the leadership team. So what the lady does when she joins the board, she just makes them more vulnerable and that's making them trust each other. So I found it difficult in the situations at that point to actually make, not me myself, but making others become more vulnerable. So kind of taking a break from open. So they can take in and I can take out. So I think it's quite a difficult task to say they're building that trust. Not kind of building trust, make both sides vulnerable. So if I forget, doing something, the other person just takes a cane and just understands that there might be something. It doesn't take it like, okay, like kind of swear you weren't in standard but you can be sure of whatever language and then it just kind of, you're being abused and you probably walk away. Just kind of understanding, so taking the law, okay, let's do something about it, let's do it by the way or whatever. And so the book was called Five Fables of... Five Fables. Five Fables of Effective Teams. Very good book, I reckon. Very strong recommendation. I really like what you said there about it coming down to having to build trust in a team and bringing in vulnerability. And I think that's also a really key part of this, is to be effective mediators, to be empowered bystanders when we see people in conflict. We often need to kind of acknowledge that to step back is to be vulnerable. And that vulnerability is a key kind of tool in the kit, is to kind of accept that people don't want to be vulnerable and we'll actually put up even more barriers to prevent that. But often vulnerability is where you get the breakthrough, where you have more honesty, transparency and can get past miscommunication. Thank you, that's a good one. Any other thoughts? We should, yes. Feel free to jump up and use the mic. Compassion. This is the thing that keeps hitting me on the head. Every conflict situation in our community that I've become aware of over the past six months in my role in the community working group is I've been tugging on my compassion bag. Like, it's like, I think I need a bit more of that. You know, I see people who are, you know, in mini wars with each other and I see them not understanding each other, not wanting to understand each other. But I have this problem that I can understand where they're coming from. Both sides. And it's not easy. So I think this is something that, again, has empowered bystanders to help resolve conflict in the community. We need goblods of compassion. Any thoughts on compassion you wanna share on bringing compassion to the table in a tech community? I mean, I'm talking about feelings stuff. This isn't something we do, right? We're geeks. Hard code. We love Drupal. We are here for our feelings. It is our passion that drives us. We care about feelings. But we're not necessarily always comfortable about expressing them. Yeah? You got any other thoughts to share? Just body language. All good. So, you know, I sort of said at the start that we bring all that we are to the table and we've all kind of experienced some conflict from kindergarten. And there are sort of, you know, there are ways of dealing with conflict that we're all familiar with that aren't necessarily particularly constructive. You know, it's probably not a good idea to pull someone's hair or spack them in the face or bite them on the chin. Cause generally all of that just, you know, ends in tears and is not a constructive response. But these are natural responses. So part of this challenge is fighting our natural kind of inclination to go wah and hit. And, you know, we ultimately kind of become toddlers again. You know, we ultimately are fighting our, you know, child at all times when we're under attack. And again, it's that fight or flight. This is base level amygdala response stuff. So we have to kind of get above that. So how? In the Drupal community, there has been a lot of drama over time. And I actually emailed WebChick. I said, here's some Drupal dramas that I remember. Can you give me a couple more? And her response was, oh man, where do I start? And like rattled off a whole bunch of things. And, you know, they have a lot of things in common. They have some things apart. I mean, we had the great git debate. We had all the redesign. We had the introduction of the code of conduct. We had whether or not we should have a third field for gender, you know, there's just these wars. But the thing about them is we value consensus above just about everything else. Well, maybe that's a bold claim, but I think we value it a lot. And that's a good thing because we do test and challenge ideas, but we're not necessarily aware of some of the pain that causes and some of the inevitable avoidance and denial as people step away from that. So we value consensus. We want to go in the same direction because we want the same things. Sometimes that's not always clear. Like, I want this one, I want this one. And we're pulling ourselves apart when really we could just turn around and go, oh, hang on, both of these could work if we work together. One of the things I think is a big problem for our community because we value consensus is when we can't get it and what happens when we can't reach consensus. We just leave stuff. We drop patches on the floor. We have hours, weeks, months of wasted effort because consensus couldn't be reached and that leads to stagnation and that is one of the kind of death knolls for a community like ours or a project like ours. If we stagnate, we're not moving anymore. We're not getting anywhere. It's not a good place to be. So how do we balance our value for consensus with maintaining healthy, productive, forward-moving innovation and improvement and ridding of technical debt? All of these things require us to keep moving and not stagnating. How do we do that? And this is where I thought I wanted, where I wanted to have a core conversation about constructive conflict resolution, that if we avoid stagnation, if we acknowledge that conflict can be positive, back to the idea of challenging and testing ideas, then we'll hopefully avoid this. So it's kind of ironic that the introduction of the Code of Conduct was one of our sources of conflict. I think it's also funny that it was a follow-up to do to add in a conflict resolution process. This one line, we borrowed heavily from Ubuntu and there was this little bit in there saying, oh yeah, we need one of these conflict resolution policy things and we'll get around to that and I think it was like three or four years sitting there. So I mentioned Prague and the community summit there. One of the things we did in Prague was look at a bunch of templates and documents, one of which was from the Victoria and I'm from Australia, the state of Victoria. Our Human Rights Commission has all of these templates online on this thing called a website and it's free to download. It's so amazing. So I had downloaded one of those templates and kind of looked at it and I'd done a very rudimentary search and replace for the organization to the Drupal community and a few other sort of key bits and pieces and we used this as a starting point for a discussion around what a conflict resolution policy might look like. Now it was overly bureaucratic and designed for human resources kind of people to sort of use. So it wasn't a perfect fit but it was a good beginning but there was also a huge amount of work done by someone called Randy Fay, who knows Randy? Some years back he started a conversation around having a conflict resolution policy and a complaints policy and how we should actually deal with this as a community. He did a lot of groundwork. So we also brought that in and we all sat around a table and hammered out ideas, we brainstormed the kinds of conflicts that we saw and then we looked at these documents and really distilled it down and we distilled it down into sort of three key steps. Peacekeepers, the conflict resolution policy is available online. We even got a pretty URL thanks to WebChick. Drupal.org slash conflict resolution. Three key steps. The first one. And sometimes the hardest and never done. Just talk to each other. Don't let that disagreement fester. Don't let that slight or that sense of attack go un-said. Some of you came in a little late, I was playing Sarah Bareilles' song Brave. It's like, let the words fall out, say it, speak it. Sometimes all you need to do is just be a little brave and go and have a conversation. Let that person know how you feel. And the flip side of this is if you're seeing this happen, if you're seeing some fight brewing, just encourage those people to have a conversation. Any examples coming to mind? Can people sort of think of times in the community they've seen the embers, the start of something where they could have said, hey, take a moment? No, he says not. The second one, because that doesn't work all the time. It works a lot of the time, which is why it's a great first step, but it doesn't always work. Sometimes you need someone else to come in and help. Find a third party who has mutual respect for both of you. If you may be that third party who's seeing this going on and may make the offer, hey, should we go have a chat about this? Can we sort of see where maybe there's some common ground or it doesn't look like it right now? Ask someone else to help mediate the dispute. Finally, if that fails, and I hope it doesn't, reach out to the community working group. We've got an incident report form. We could also be found in IRC on Twitter via email, but there's an incident report form where you can basically lay out the facts of the case effectively, and we become not quite like a court, but we at least try to understand all sides of the issue and try to bring people together. But hopefully they've gotten through talking to each other and mediating and it doesn't ever come to us. We're kind of like the buck stops with us though, so reaching out to the community working group. And hopefully we can find a way through. Sometimes it, yeah, feels a bit that way. But if you find yourself, like hands up, have you been involved in a community dispute of some kind? Yeah? Hands up, never. You just kind of don't know what we're talking about and wonder why you're in this room right now. No one says there's a little, I hope there's a little grain of activity here for all of you. One of the tools that I found really useful when I'm confronted with this intractable issues between people is this idea, the drama triangle. We get drawn in to this triangle of drama and we get asked to play different roles in it. Does this seem familiar to anybody? Is this resonating with people, a persecutor-rescuer victim as a bit of a cycle? Someone is feeling under attack and starts kind of talk about how they're being victimized and they're feeling the victim, they're playing the victim. Then they'll draw someone in who becomes their rescuer, who then exerts all of this energy to sort of help them get over the vulnerability and become the rescuer. But in both of those, there has to be someone who's persecuting the person who's feeling like the victim. But then it can flip. And someone might call in, someone might try to start casting you as the persecutor. When you're like, whoa, I didn't do nothing. But they need to have a persecutor to be able to feel like, to be able to play this game and be involved in this drama. And really when you can sort of separate these out and see that it is a kind of mega game, it gives you an opportunity to step back and be objective. But this isn't useful beyond that. This is kind of a framework for understanding, motivation and action, but it doesn't give you a tool to move past it. So kind of evolution of this thought was an empowerment dynamic that you switch from persecutor, rescuer and victim to creator, challenger and coach. And they're flipped. So the victim becomes the creator, someone who's chasing goals, looking for new ideas, building things rather than being, seeking attention as a victim. And the persecutor becomes the challenger, testing the ideas, helping make them better. And the coach becomes that process of bringing the best out of the creator, saying take this idea further, facilitate, enhance. And ultimately I think it comes down to, do you want to tear me down? Is that what this conflict is about? Is this about you winning and me losing? That's not constructive. Could we flip it? Could we change that? Could we build something together? Could we understand what separates us, what divides us, what our differences are, and then put them aside? And work on what we do have in common, what we do want to achieve together. And that is make, in most cases in this context, make Drupal better. We have different ideas of what making Drupal better means. And that might be the bit we need to put aside to move forward. So I want us to build, it's not bizarre, I hadn't even noticed that there was a noise before. Sorry, the air conditioning went off and now it's back on again. Sorry. So I want us to build a culture of respect. So back to my slide of the people bowing in respect, feeling respected, being respectful, feeling respected and being respectful. I want us to empower bystanders in our community. I don't know, some of you may have been, may have seen a video that went viral, I think late last year from the Australian army about the problem of gender in the army and sexual harassment. And this army general just looked on the barrel of the camera and was talking about this really big thorny issue and the fact that it was a problem in the Australian Defence Forces. But he said at the end, you are what you, what you're prepared to walk past and not do something about. And that kind of really resonated with me. It's like, I would like to see us all become empowered bystanders. That if we see something that we feel is hurting our community, that we see people who are in locked in combat and locked in conflict and ceasing to be useful and causing these ripple effects, then we should be empowered to say, hey, can we help? Or maybe say, hey, Donna, community working group. And some people have started doing this. But I want it to become something, obviously I can't do on my own with a community, a global community of our size, that we need more people to be our Drupal peacekeepers. So building a culture of respect where bystanders are empowered to help, where it's okay to challenge ideas to help make it better. Because ultimately, love this quote, whenever too good people argue over principles, they're both right. That arguing, that testing actually makes things better. So how can we have that kind of conflict debate in a powerful, positive and constructive way? By understanding that we have cultural baggage, by coming to the table with respect, by having compassion, by being open and trusting, all of these things are the key ingredients in this recipe. So really, I'd like to sort of leave with, I guess a couple of images. Constructive resolution of conflict does not look like this. We do not want holes blown in walls as the kind of outcome of war and combat and conflict. That's not building something. We need to work in such a way where we're creating something better than we started with. And hopefully that ends up looking more like fields of sunflowers. That was what I wanted to kind of pose as a starting point. And I don't know that we've got a huge amount more time, but does anyone want to comment, ask a question, throw a tomato? Yeah, so actually I have a couple of things about respect. So I think the problem is that we don't give credit to everyone the same way. Oh, yes. So I mean, that goes, I mean, that's an issue. Yes. And you add the fact that we lack consensus, but we don't have a clear authority figure. To decide when we don't agree. Yes. Which leads to stagnation. Yes. So I mean, what can we do to kind of get that better? I don't know. But that's exactly the right kind of question, right? Is, yeah, I don't know, a good question there. Exactly, this is the kind of thinking that I want to all walk away from this with. How do we deal with these kind of bigot issues? Thanks. So one thing that you mentioned in your presentation was this notion of the fact that we often resort to our inner toddler or want to resort to our inner toddler about things because we feel under attack. And it started me thinking about the role that burnout plays, both in people being less likely to use their adult social skills and more likely to resort to that person who's really focused on their own needs. And might have compassion for other people but not be able to set that as a priority and put that emotional experience or that feeling of threatenedness aside. And I think it also, it plays a role in not just how people, two people involved in the conflict, but it also plays a role in how other people can mediate, right? Because it's very easy to say, you know, first of all, I've got too much of my play. I just can't take this on. It's very difficult to invest emotional energy in people you see who are not behaving like the people you know them to be or you feel are not measuring up to your picture of them. And so if you feel like you have to put your own energy into that relationship to try to help them get back to where they are. So what I'm wondering is, you know, what can we do about the fact that we put a lot of, I'm not sure if it's, we as a community put pressure on people or we let people put pressure on themselves, but the role that burnout plays in making our conflicts actually a lot worse than they are. Yeah, also really good comments there. The two things that came bubbled up in my mind while you were speaking, Jess. One is emotional labor. There's a, we have work in our world. We, you know, write patches and do reviews and some people commit code and documentation stuff, but there's this element which is emotional labor and there's never any credit for that. And sort of you're saying that, you know, some people don't get credit equally for the effort that they expend in the community as a source of conflict. But burnout is a real problem. And I think probably one of the motivators for me submitting this talk is that we actually have to acknowledge emotional labor, the fact that we're burning people out, fact that innocent bystanders are being impacted by conflicts that they have nothing to do with, they see that going on and they walk away. And that adds to this whole sense of kind of tiredness and fatigue when really we're actually, we're actually focused on the same kinds of things, but all of that stuff that's getting in the way of it being constructive, productive, rather than soul destroying. Yeah, thanks Jess. I don't have an answer again for that one. They're good questions, good questions. Yeah, so according to your first point, if you wanted to talk to somebody to resolve the conflict, what if they don't, doesn't even want to talk or, you know, they just absolutely say no, okay? And second question is related to second point. You thought, you said that you should bring third person in. So what kind of third person specialized in conflict resolution or a technical person who can understand both sides of the situation? Because a situation, because all the times in the community I have conflicts with other, if I had, it's related to technical things, okay? And I consider myself as a very junior contributor to core as you know the others as very senior contribution working with four or five hour experience or years experience with core. So I feel a bit like, you know, tiny contributor in terms of that. So I value their contribution, but there is a conflict and I want to respect that. But how can I, you know, put my voice in front of them? Okay, thank you. Very, also a very good question. So the first one is really common. You wanna try and reach out to someone to resolve it and they just won't. They just won't. They wanna do the avoidance and denial side of things. Really hard. And if they won't, you try the second one. It's really all you can do. Or you end up going, well, there's nothing I can do here and I'm gonna go invest my energy elsewhere. But again, that's not really a kind of constructive resolution that we're looking for. So you really have to try and find a way to move them from no to maybe. And sometimes it's, you know, bringing that sense of vulnerability and letting them know, hey, you're vulnerable and you want to work this out. There are very few people who are so hard-hearted that they would continue to, you know, refuse at that point. But it's this human nature game. It's a bit tricky. So then the second one is where do you find a mediator? Do they have to be skilled in conflict resolution? Well, actually, no. This is perhaps counterintuitive. But like I said at the start, we've all been kind of doing conflict resolution in one way or another all our lives. Have a little trust and faith that if you care, you'll help them find a way. And so it's more about finding the right person who's willing to accept that both of you have a valid concern or issue. So it doesn't have to be someone who necessarily has all these great skills. It's gonna be great if they do. But part of this conversation was hopefully creating a bit of a movement within the community that we increase collectively our skills in doing this to avoid stagnation and keep the project moving forward. Great example for the recording. No, fantastic. So trying to repeat what you said. If someone's not willing to talk and you drag in a mediator, they're not gonna talk to the mediator either. So finding that third person who's perhaps a friend of the person who won't talk to you, who is willing to kind of help them break down their defenses and then have a conversation is gonna be much more productive than the best mediator in the world. And then the final piece of your question was about when it's a really technical issue, then sometimes I think they're easier to solve because you can find someone who also has an understanding of the technical area, you lay them down and you say, okay, there are these different approaches. Here's the pros and cons. If you can be purely rational and logical about it and this approach would be improved by taking an element from this approach, then that's a really constructive path forward and exactly the point of my whole challenge tests ideas and makes them better. So you need to get a technical adjudicator. It's very different to when it's this kind of murky, toddler, human conflict kind of stuff. So have some trust, take a leaf out of the Australian distrust of authority and just go and say, hey, I reckon this. Yes. To both your questions actually, a strategy that people have used on me that I've noticed is very effective. When someone doesn't want to talk about a conflict or doesn't want to try to discuss it at all and in technical disagreements also, a very effective thing to do is to start off by not saying anything and just ask someone to say, what do you think? Why do you think this? Can you explain this to me? Can you explain that to me? There are some people that we have in Drupal who are brilliant at doing that and most people want a chance to state their opinion and say what they think and talk about themselves, whether it's personally or technically or some melange of the two. So I find that if you can just step back and for a while just hold off on stating any of your opinions, which is hard for me, but other people do it very well. That gives the person your chance, talking to a chance to start opening up to you and so then you can get to the point where you're saying, well, why do you think this? And then once they've talked to you for a while, so what I'm hearing you say is, did I understand this correctly? This is what I think you just said to me rephrased in my own words. So you're describing active listening, which is something that wasn't in my slides, but it's also a really key part of this. Yeah, definitely. And giving people an opportunity to be heard, asking them good questions, really powerful part of getting to the heart of it. Oh, I just want to note though, it is 11.45 and I think that that means our time is effectively up, but there's a little bit of overlap time. So if some of you want to get up and run out and do things and go to your next session, then feel free. It's lunch. So we can just talk for hours. But you have permission to leave now if you want to, but I think we're going to keep talking for a little bit constructive feedback, please. Node 1698, I'm sure something amazing happened that year, that I'd love to get your feedback, Node 1698, but also at Catacrab, tweet me. So I'll leave that up. So if you want to go, go otherwise. Yeah, so quick question, we value consensus, but sometimes we can't get it. So what does a constructive answer to lack of consensus looks like? Dictatorship. So I mean, this is the thing, sometimes consensus can't be reached. It just can't, the opposing ideas are so different that they're completely different directions. And then it's a matter of saying, okay, we've got to pick a direction and this is the direction we're going. And if you can bring some elements of the opposing idea with you, then you might bring that person with you in that other direction. Then that's being respectful of their contribution. It may not be their solution, but maybe there were elements that have improved and that means we're going in a different direction. I think the really important thing is separating out the ideas from the people. And that's where a lot of this stuff gets really murky because people invest their identities in what they do and in their efforts in the community. We need to be separate as people from what we contribute. It's a good question though. Dictatorship may not be the right answer, but it's my answer. Not rational arguments, absolutely. And for the recording to be able to offer competing or challenging ideas in a respectful way so that the other person doesn't lose face. Because ego is so caught up in this, that you need to be able to do this in a way that doesn't cause people to feel like they're being attacked or being told they're stupid or wrong or something. You've got to do it respectfully, yeah? Feel free to come up to the mic and say it in your own words. I know it's tricky one, but I haven't seen any cases in Drupal communities though, but I know that in a conflict resolution, sometimes you may get to the issue of favoritism. So it's a question. Do you have any comments on that? I'm trying to think of that quote, but transparency I think is really, really important for combating that sense of favoritism. We really suffer from who you know is more, is better currency than what you know in this community. I'm really, really painfully aware of that because I've seen some extraordinary, like a really good example, the project application queue. There's this backlog of modules that people want to contribute back to our community but we won't let them. Some get through faster than others. Because of, they know the right people to alert to it. I can get you in, yeah, and it's a real, real problem. And I think that in some ways, not one that we can combat, like it's not gonna go away. So I think that the mitigating, and I could be wrong about this, I'm hypothesizing now, but I think the really important thing with favoritism is to shine a light on it, right? To say we're aware this happens, to be transparent about it, and to kind of take stock. Are we giving this, am I paying more attention here because I've been asked by the right person or because they're showing me the due amount of respect and deference and this sorts of things? It's a really difficult issue. And I think, like we say, being empowered bystanders when you see something, say something, if you think that you're seeing undue favoritism happening, then that's one of those seeds. That's one of those moments where you go, hey, hang on, all of these things deserve some attention too. Yeah, really hard one, definitely tricky, definitely tricky. Any other thoughts? Lunch beckons? Thank you all so, so much for coming to this core conversation. I hope that you have taken a useful seed of a thought of a beginning of a flame of something and we'll take that forward. Look up the Drupal and the community working group, look through for some of the things. We have an issue queue. Actually, Maury's posted a fantastic issue that I need to figure out how to use Git to resolve. But I really invite you, and this is my call to action, I invite all of you who have been willing to come to a core conversation on conflict resolution at DrupalCon to step up and be this kind of peace core of empowered bystanders to help us through these murky waters. Conflict is fine, it's human, it happens. Let's make the most of it and use it as effectively as we can. Constructive conflict resolution is the way forward for building a better Drupal, not tearing each other down and not getting stuck in Drupal drama. Thank you. And now, it's Smarkalik, as the Dutch say, bon appetit. Thank you.