Evolve governance & feature set

[MattiSG]

I have been a maintainer of this repo for over 2 years now. I believe it provides value to the community, have identified limitations to its current mode of operation, and would like to open a discussion around how to solve them.

Observations

Through handling and classifying open issues and PRs, I have identified two recurring types.

Translation improvements / additions

The process for these (which I applied from previous usage, and agree with) is to make sure at least one other native speaker proofreads the changes. I tag these as needs-proofreading.

The difficulty here is that many languages are stuck. I unblocked a couple by advertising the need on Twitter, but that does not always does the trick.

I feel that having “referent” native speakers we could solicit for each language would be easier and more efficient.

Changes on the meaning

Some suggestions change not only wording or translations, but the actual meaning of the code of conduct template, and intend to make it more specific, more general, or more actionable.

As I felt I not could arbitrate these issues on my own (nor that anyone should, really), I tagged them redaction-committee in the hope that we would establish said committee at some point, so that we could find ways to collectively decide which changes are appropriate and which are not.

Conferences only

In terms of usage, I identified a recurring feedback on the current template: its phrasing only targets conferences with organisers, and many groups want to use it in slightly different contexts (meetups, gatherings…). Yes, this is a template and it is easy for reusers to change the words in their copy.

I am not aiming at having a discussion on whether this is an appropriate use case or not in this issue, only to share that observation.

Template only

Another use case that is wished (and that was made explicitly unsupported in #142) is to link to this hosted CoC instead of adapting it to the event.

I am not aiming at having a discussion on whether this is an appropriate use case or not in this issue, only to share that observation.

Domain name & usage data ownership

The domain name on which this service is made available is paid by a single person / entity who is, as I understand it as the moment, @remy (thanks @remy!).
I believe this is both unfair to the payer and a (admittedly minor considering the care that has been taken to maintain this service) risk for the community. It also means that the usage data (i.e. basic analytics of visitors / month for each translation, backlinks…) is not easily available.

Propositions

In order to solve these issues, I would like to investigate the opportunity to:

1. Establish a slightly more official governance, somewhere on the spectrum from a simple collection of names to an actual NGO. This would make it easier to make decisions that impact everyone, and the latter could even provide us with some funding opportunities.
2. Share costs (and access) to the domain & servers.
3. Define a way to make hard choices (e.g. There are many legitimate cases for the use of sexual language and imagery in talks, workshops, etc. #131, Offensive verbal comments related to…religion — problematic precedent. #53) on the contents of the CoC. Considering discussions such as Offensive verbal comments related to…religion — problematic precedent. #53 and Add political preferences to list of items #140, just having discussions through GitHub seems to bring only the most privileged individuals, which is probably not what we want.
4. Organise a “translatathon” in order to push through the translation efforts.
5. Implement a technical way to easily change the qualifier of the event (i.e. en.confcodeofconduct.com/meetup could remplace all occurrences of “conference” with “meetup”).
6. Create the equivalent of Creative Commons license families for Code of Conducts, where a very limited subset of combinatory options covers almost the entirety of possible choices. For example, allowing sexual imagery & clothing as an explicit option could solve There are many legitimate cases for the use of sexual language and imagery in talks, workshops, etc. #131 without risking removing protection in other cases.

I understand that some, if not all, of these ideas are a significant departure from the current choices made in this project. I have no intention to enforce them in any way: if there is no support I am happy to keep maintaining this way; if there is support but also good cases for the current “just a template, copy-paste and adapt if it doesn't work for you”, I'm happy to work on an alternative with those interested; and if there is strong support, I'm happy to work on evolving the current feature set here 🙂

Next step

I believe that it will be more efficient (because of higher communication bandwidth) and more useful (because those who will attend a synchronous workshop are more likely to be committed) to have a first discussion over a video conference rather than as an asynchronous debate. I would thus like to offer to host a 45 minutes discussion on the topics above.

If you are interested, please fill in your availability here: https://framadate.org/confcoc-evolutions
If no slot works for you and you'd like to participate, please share your constraints here.