Non-technical leadership and a critique of Mozilla's Participation Guidelines

Mozilla Alum Christie Koehler just published a blog post in which she discusses the difficulties of adopting codes of conduct to create an environment that encourages diverse and inclusive participation within open source communities.

It’s a pretty great blog post worth sharing here on its own merits, but it’s especially important because she offers a critique of Mozilla’s current Participation Guidelines of which she had a role in establishing.

https://subfictional.com/2016/01/25/the-complex-reality-of-adopting-a-meaningful-code-of-conduct/

There’s a lot of great stuff to unpack in this post about governance and community leadership that’s worth exploring here, but I wanted to highlight the Participation Guidelines piece because even if we don’t revisit them anytime soon, its advice on conflict resolution is lackluster and turns the entire document into a symbolic gesture with no teeth.

At some point we’re going to have to put processes for conflict resolution in place that help us retain contributors, help contributors level up within the organization, and strengthen the overall community. Christie’s experience both in and out of Mozilla can be informative here, and I’m sure others within the community have similar as well as differing points of view that can productively push this conversation forwards.

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Hi Lyre,

Thanks for sharing this - I’ve followed Christie’s commentary so far, and knew this post was coming and read it thoroughly. I’ve also been following the Ruby CoC fiasco, and as part of creating our code for the recent leadership summit spent quite a bit of time pouring through existing conducts, before even attempting our first version. @larissashapiro is the one who can speak to the evolution of the Participation Guidelines. I believe Stormy also had a very important role in their development as another resource.

Based on the experience of creating our event Code of Conduct for the Leadership Summit I 100% can speak from experience that with Christie’s - creating these are very complex. And the resulting feedback has also complex to navigate - on one side, I’ve heard the language isn’t strong enough, on the other side I’ve heard the language is a joke. Where to from here? Ever forward.

And so, Lyre, while I agree that we need to productively push this conversation, I would suggest we need to level up quite a bit more than that. We need proposals, pull requests, change requests, issues (whatever your action preference is) that make conversation actionable. Improving these CoC & Participation Guidelines needs everyone, and it will take time.

This was a great line from Christie’s post:

For the change to be navigated successfully, great care
needs to be applied and community leaders, as well as everyone
participating in the discussion really need to step up their game. There
needs to be room for anger, for disagreement, for being weary of
change, for being ravenously hungry for change. People have to be
willing to change their minds.

And people on both sides of opinion need to be willing to change their minds
If we agree, that we love our community, and that everyone should feel welcomed, safe and included - then I know we can get there. People are evaluating the value of communities based on the availability and clarity of such codes, this is important - it can’t be dismissed.

Thanks Lyre.

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Critical discussion and please don’t think I’m ignoring it - I’m just also in the midst of an Asian travel jag. I am reading and thinking and have a lot to say. I 100% agree that people evaluate the value of communities based on the availability and clarity of codes and this extends to everything from where to speak and what to attend to what volunteer opportunities or even jobs to consider. So. It’s critical.

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I have seen at least two occasions (that I can immediately recall) in the past one year where I could clearly say that something was wrong, something was done in a way that is not up to the mark for Mozillians interacting with each other, but could not interrupt because our participation guidelines does not explicitly point out unacceptable behavior. We have to decide by ourselves what is acceptable or not based on the participation guidelines and that is no better than where we were. If I were to interrupt based on my reading and understanding, that would make my interruption less effective compared to when I can just point out that “hey, our participation guidelines have given this behavior as an example of unacceptable behavior. Please mend your ways”

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Oh, I fully agree! And if I find time and get to it before anyone else, I will be writing proposals, posting issues and doing the community work. :slight_smile:

My intention in posting this is to keep the mindshare around this fresh and perhaps surface things like history and current feelings. I think this is something that should be a priority (to/by/for who though?) and this is less a call to action and more a signal boost for people who also feel this way. With so many priorities competing for our personal and collective time, I think it’s good to check in on things that may be on the backburner just to make sure they’re not there for too long.

Actually, the code of conduct you’ve created for leadership summit is far more comprehensive (with examples) compared to Mozilla Participation guidelines. So, this thread could be used as a reason to incorporate content from this CoC into that participation guidelines so that it binds to all Mozillians at all times rather than just leadership summit. What is the right way to modify participation guidelines? Proposal in governance mailing list?

What a great read. Especially from someone coming over from the webmaker side of MoFo who really knew nothing about the struggles and disagreements faced.

I am hesitant to get involved in the discussion. Espcecially since there is so much history. One thing I do note is there seems to be a philosophical trap embedded in the approach.

To be more inclusive we have to be more exclusive in only working with those that agree.

Christie spoke at length of getting people to respect multiple perspectives but her cure seems to be adherence to strict values and visions laid out early in the process. She even wrote this may cause people to leave the project.

I am sure this might reference the debate around gmail and Mozilla using non FOSS tools or other deeply engrained philosophy but I do not think rigid dogmatism is a path to greater inclusion.

This. If we could think about what success would be - it would be to encourage movement from dissent, disagreement and objection to actionable proposals / Pull requests etc. One of the hardest parts of writing a CoC was to get people to a) read it before objecting b) propose changes that brought in the perspective of others. I hope we can do that.

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I haven’t spent time researching codes of conduct so I don’t know what’s out there. But it seems to me that the only way to get unstuck is not to proscribe or ban particular actions, but to proscribe attitudes. I think it’s hard when we’re in tech because we’re so used to working with rules and finite instructions. But people don’t work that way. You can’t program a person to never make a mistake. I think people want a list of things they can do and a list of things they can’t do and then they know they won’t break the rules. But that’s impossible.

I’d like to see a code that focuses more on how we treat each other - that we should be compassionate in our dealings with others at all times, which includes when someone has made a mistake (compassion doesn’t mean forgiveness), that focuses on how we resolve conflict, that we try to resolve conflict. That people are always doing their best to hear how they can improve and not saying “well that’s not listed in the code of conduct” or “no one said they had a problem with it at the time.”

I think we may also need to offer training along-side the code. The diversity and inclusion workshops that have been offered help illustrate that we need to always work at paying attention to how we make other people feel, and help explain why we can’t just make an “easy” list.

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In a word, yes! I want to make the CPG far more specific and more akin to the event specific guidelines we’ve now used for View Source and for the Participation Leadership Summit. I am actively working on the Participation Guidelines and would love to discuss - and while the Governance list is a totally appropriate place, I do not think all the stakeholders read it. So its one place.

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