The postmarketOS CoC (Code of Conduct) Team was established late last year, it is made up of myself (Casey), Oliver, Luca, and Bart. Other than being open source maintainers, none of us had much experience or training to deal with actual conflicts, and we had not developed any proper processes describing how we deal with issues.
The potential fallout from poorly handling a conflict is huge, and it's our responsibility to prevent that from happening by ensuring that issues are dealt with timely and fairly, and are communicated effectively to all parties.
Historical team structure
Before the CoC Team, interpersonal conflicts were typically handled by the Core Contributors, operating in good faith to try and resolve issues. While this is typically acceptable for small projects, there is zero accountability and lots of potential for miscommunication especially as more people are involved.
The CoC email address help@postmarketos.org was originally set up as an alias to the infrastructure team. Additionally, very little communication was made about the creation of this early CoC pseudo-team, and as a result we believe the CoC Team were viewed as a "last resort" for the community, a major oversight on our behalf.
The new team
The new CoC Team has been around for a while but we are writing this blog post to clarify our purpose and provide additional context. The exact nature of the CoC Team and processes we follow can now be seen on the updated enforcement section of the CoC page and the new CoC Team: Processes and Guidelines page.
We have taken a lot of inspiration from the Freedesktop constitution, as their CoC Team have well established and documented processes. We have been careful to be explicit about dealing with conflict of interest situations and the confidential nature of CoC reports.
Stating the obvious
The CoC Team are here to help the community, if you feel as though someone has behaved in a way that violates the CoC, either towards you or someone else, please don't hesitate to get in touch with us.
It doesn't matter who it was, be it a member of the core team or someone on the CoC Team, we all need to follow the same standards and nobody is exempt from the Code of Conduct.
Your report is kept entirely confidential, either within the CoC Team or by the individual you make the report to, they will not share any information without confirming with you beforehand. The person you reported does not need to know that the report came from you.
Training and process
In addition to the lack of communication, it has become clear to us that as-is we are not best equipped to deal with CoC issues and this is something we urgently need to fix.
Therefore, the entire CoC Team will be undergoing CoC enforcement training, we will also be developing internal processes for dealing with reports both individually and as a team.
In addition, we will work to become more proactive in dealing with issues, for example by censoring or deleting comments on Matrix or GitLab that violate the CoC.
Here to stay
We hope this post has cleared up any misunderstandings about the existence and purpose of the postmarketOS CoC Team. We are not a last resort and it is typically best to contact us sooner so we can help prevent issues from escalating. Getting in touch doesn't mean that severe action will be taken, and more often than not we can resolve issues peacefully.
We have a lot of learning and improvement to do, and in the meantime we may consider conferring with trusted members of the freedesktop CoC Team for help. We intend to be a team you can trust, and to ensure that our community will remain a safe space for all.