[diversity] Experiences from the Django community

Hello Malcolm,

On 13 Jul 2017, at 17:06, Malcolm Hutty <malcolm at linx.net> wrote:
> I saw that the "less obvious" checklist your cited linked to this tweet
> of a poster at Django.
> https://twitter.com/rixxtr/status/715558514631041025
> 
> Was action taken against the creator of the poster on the left for
> breach of the Code of Conduct? What kind of action was taken?

I’m not sure in which way you believe the poster on the left violated
the CoC. As far as I know, no reports were made to the CoC team of
that conference about this poster, and to my knowledge no action
was taken.

> If the CARE committee maintains a "blacklist" of "repeat offenders", is
> this public? Are people on the list informed that they're on it, why,
> and what it says about them?

So, there’s two important things to distinguish in the Django community:
The CARE team is composed of local conference organisers, and not under
direct supervision from anywhere else. Not all conferences call their
CoC team “CARE” - but let’s stick with that term for now for simplicity.
The only absolute requirement is that if the name of an event uses the
Django trademark, they are required to have a CoC.

In addition, there is the Django Software Foundation, which holds the 
Django trademark and receives and provides sponsorship, amongst other 
things. The DSF has a Code of Conduct committee, which deals with 
CoC reports in the wider community, such as mailing lists. The committee 
can also provide support and advice.

CoC incidents at conferences are primarily handled by the local CARE 
team, though they may ask the CoC committee for input. The CARE team
makes their own decisions on how to handle an incident.

The CARE team is encouraged, but not required, to send a report of
encountered incidents and the measures they took to the CoC committee.
The committee will assess whether they believe further action is needed,
though usually it’s not, and record the incident.

If an incident is reported to the CoC committee directly, they follow
the enforcement manual to come to a decision, and record the incident.

The record of incidents is not public. When someone who violated the CoC
is spoken to, they should be informed that the incident will be reported
and kept on record. Records for almost all incidents have an expunging
date, except of course lifetime bans, which are extremely rare.

Having been involved in an incident also almost never bans someone
from the community, so it’s not a blacklist - these people are still 
welcome to participate. However, when a conference submits their list 
of speakers, we might say “we recommend that you have an extra talk 
with this person about X”. Even this is rare though.

> Do Django participants have any right to challenge, appeal, or even be
> heard on the subject of accusations against them? How does that process
> work? Or is the CARE committee's decision final?

For decisions of a CARE team, there is generally no formal challenge
process, as the team doesn’t directly answer to anyone else - it’s their
event. However, someone could escalate an issue to the CoC committee,
and although we have no formal power, I imagine the DSF and the community
can put pressure on the organisers. It rather depends on the exact 
circumstances though.

People disagreeing with decisions is very rare though. It’s also important 
to keep in mind that a lot of incidents and resolutions are minor.
Most enforcement consists of telling someone “hey, we were told that you
did that, we have a CoC, it’s not ok, and this is why” - and they say
“yes, I did that, sorry, I didn’t realise, won’t happen again”.

For decisions of the CoC committee, there is an option to request
reconsideration by the DSF board. Any directly affected party can ask for
this - to my knowledge this has never actually happened.

I do want to stress that I am speaking from my own perspective, and none
of this is necessarily the formal opinion of the DSF or the CoC committee.

Also, the CoC and it’s surrounding processes are far from perfect. From
time to time we discover ways in which we could do better, or be clearer,
and make amendments to the way we work. I’m sure this will continue for
quite some time. For example, we recently clarified our reporting guide:
https://github.com/django/djangoproject.com/pull/757/files

Erik