Code of Conduct enforcing

As hopefully everyone is aware, we have a Code of Conduct (CoC) in our repository. I think we should find someone who is interested in taking care of possible requests about it.

I don’t think we have any case where we need to enforce it right now, but I would consider it useful, when there would be a better way to report such topics. The current CoC says:

Instances of abusive, harassing, or otherwise unacceptable behavior may be reported by opening an issue or contacting one or more of the project maintainers.

But we currently have no obvious way to contact maintainers (besides sending an email to email addresses listed in user profiles on GitHub). I think we should explore easier ways to provide such feedback. For example by private messages on this forum or mentioning Matrix as an possible end-to-end encrypted channel.

I also want to highlight one of the reasons why I don’t think I’m the right person to enforce it in first place. There is an line in the CoC that makes the problem obvious:

Project maintainers who do not follow or enforce the Code of Conduct may be permanently removed from the project team.

Which really shows that maintainers shouldn’t be self-controlling but have an external control instance as there is a conflict of interest. Therefore I would love to see someone who is not directly involved as a maintainer, taking this place and be our watch(wo)man.

Feel free to share your thoughts and opinions here :slight_smile:

This is an important thing in the same way firefighters are important. You can’t start assigning them when there’s a fire already.

For the reasons stated already I think I should not have this role either. I will, however, offer to do this until someone else can be found.

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Addition in order to summarize the discussion on Matrix:

It was pointed out that the contact address problem in the CoC should have a high priority and we should provide a direct address of the responsible people, not a collective address in order to allow reports about responsible people themselves.

As a consideration it was pointed out that we could link the profiles of discourse users but at the same time should make sure we also provide an email address in order to lower the barrier to contact people. (Addition from my side: I would also like to make sure that we offer OpenPGP keys to offer private communication)

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I could potentially do this if everyone agrees I’m fit for it haha.

As to “qualifications”, I’m a member of the UBports Community Steering Committee and have been for nearly a year. Our purpose is interacting with the community surrounding UBports and Ubuntu Touch and a large part of that is dealing with trouble individuals, whether that’s resolving an intense debate, removing spam from our public channels, or addressing issues in private. I’ve also volunteered to fill this same position with the librehosters network once the role is fully defined.

My email address is amolith@nixnet.xyz and my GPG key is on my website. I’ve also set up Web Key Directory for automatic key discovery without having to mess with keyservers. I regularly renew the expiration date as well as rotate the subkeys :+1:

I’m fairly busy so I wouldn’t be able to take a particularly active role in enforcing the CoC but I can certainly do more behind-the-scenes work and address emails and private messages!