Discuss our Community Participation Guidelines

Move your thoughts 💭 Advocacy
#1

This is the companion discussion topic to our Social Coding Community Participation Guidelines wiki post.

When these guidelines have been created in any location where they are used (e.g. in a CODE-OF-CONDUCT.md in a code repository) it is sufficient to refer to them in a similar way Mozilla does:

Community Participation Guidelines

This repository is governed by Mozilla’s code of conduct and etiquette guidelines.
For more details, please read the
Mozilla Community Participation Guidelines.

How to Report

For more information on how to report violations of the Community Participation Guidelines, please read our ‘How to Report’ page.

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Social Coding Community Participation Guidelines [Wiki Post]
#2

I have updated the wiki post so that the guidelines relate to Social Coding Movement. I am very happy with the contents of the document. The Mozilla CoC lends itself very well for a Movement like ours, in their breadth and scope and the thoughtful formulations it uses.

I have added the guidelines to a community repository on Codeberg, from where it can be referenced from other locations, in similar way as shown above.

#3

I just found this post by @mayel containing reference to a paper Designing Care and Commoning into a Code of Conduct (PDF) by Cindy Kohtala of the Aalto University, Finland. It may have some nice further insights to improve our participation guidelines.

Despite claims to being counterculture and a better alternative, grassroots activist design groups and free culture movements may replicate the marginalizing behaviours of dominant society, also in their governance and designs of their interaction platforms. We developed a code-of-conduct, or Community Guidelines, for our online commons- oriented group to nurture a sense of a caring and mutually responsible community. The guidelines aim to bring into online interaction the living person-to-person dialogic relationality we exhibit in collaborative work offline. Our social learning process could have implications for designing healthier online community protocols and platforms and be able to better tackle the challenges of intersectionality.

(Also cross-referencing to Architecture of Participation)

#4

Our code of conduct is largely inspired by that paper and adapted from the guidelines they wrote: Bonfire

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#5

CoC Enforcement

There’s still a couple of small things to do on the Social Coding Community Participation Guidelines, like hosting at conduct.coding.social

But the guidelines describing the actual Code of Conduct is only part of the Well-being process of a community or project. Actually enforcing the CoC in an inclusive, fair, and transparent manner is most important. And the way that is done needs to be well thought out and documented.

There’s a free e-book on the subject written by Valerie Aurora and Marie Gardiner:

How to respond to Code of Conduct Reports

  • What to include in a code of conduct (and what to leave out)
  • How to prepare to enforce a code of conduct
  • Step-by-step instructions on how to respond to a report
  • In-depth discussion of relevant topics
  • Dozens of real-world examples of responding to reports

Update:

Forgejo project is figuring out Moderation procedures: #138 - Channel moderation approaches - meta - Codeberg.org and best-practices can be formulated in conjunction to that.

Also there’s a great guide on how to deal with Trolls (and not become one yourself while doing so). There’s 2 versions:

#6

Input for further improvements …

In follow-up to mention of these guidelines (as published in participate.coding.social) on the Fediverse @msavoritias posted a follow-up on providing examples of a good CoC (in my mind) and also good rules for community governance.

#7

Enhancement: Grassroots SOS peer production principles

The text at https://participate.coding.social is no longer accurate and must be updated:

  • Social coding is an “umbrelly movement” and not a “community”.
    • Convey the difference clearly, explain the philosophy of movement in context of social coding.
    • Replace references to “community” with proper “hedonic peer production”-related terms.
    • Explain the public umbrella services that are on offer (forum space, other channels).
  • Explain the themes and scope of social coding movement and expected mindset.
    • Mutual expectations aren’t properly managed yet, unbalanced, leading to confusion.
  • Explain the concept of Sustainable open software and relationship to FOSS
    • Note: Should split up into separate task to add terms to the Glossary (smallcircle project artifact)

TODO: Improve the texts collectively and update channels to latest version of the guidelines.