Carbon Language community transparency report through 2023-03-31

[CelineausBerlin]

The Carbon community works to be welcoming and kind among itself and to others,
with a deep commitment to psychological safety, and we want to ensure that
doesn’t change as we grow and evolve. To that end, we have a few ground rules
that we ask all community members to adhere to:

• be welcoming,
• be friendly and patient,
• be considerate,
• be kind,
• be careful in the words that we choose,
• when we disagree, try to understand why, and
• recognize when progress has stopped, and take a step back.

The following summary is intended to help the community understand what kinds of
Code of Conduct (CoC) incidents were brought to our attention lately, and how we
dealt with them.

Publishing such transparency reports on a regular basis is helping us track progress
and hold ourselves accountable to high standards of community culture.

Summary

9 months into Carbon’s open community’s existence, we know more about incident
categories we find helpful, so we updated our incident documentation accordingly.

Our moderation team size has slightly shrunk to 12 mods, while our corresponding
workload shrunk as well.

Our AutoMod bots are automatically catching the use of some harmful language
and spam.
They have blocked 65 messages, and flagged 6. There have been 17 other
documented incidents during that same period.
That means 88+ conduct-related incidents were taken care of by our moderation
team, in one way or another.

Please note that some incidents may have escaped our attention. Please help us
keep our spaces welcoming and fostering a spirit of collaboration, and report
any situation that may require our intervention:
https://github.com/carbon-language/carbon-lang/blob/trunk/CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md

As of April, we also have a brand new CoC team which will take care of reports
and moderation intervention escalations, under the lead of our community & culture
specialist, and is separate from the Carbon leads.

Our interventions from 2023-01-01 through 2023-03-31

The moderation team is running biweekly meetups and an internal book club to
expand their knowledge.
The book club focussed on unconscious racial bias in Q2 2023.

These are the conduct incidents that were brought to our attention last quarter:

• "Be welcoming. We strive to be a community that welcomes and supports
  people of all backgrounds and identities. This includes, but is not limited to,
  members of any race, ethnicity, culture, national origin, color, immigration
  status, social and economic class, educational level, sex, sexual orientation,
  gender identity and expression, physical appearance, age, size, family status,
  relationship status, political belief, religion or lack thereof, and mental and
  physical ability."
  Carbon community Code of Conduct, version from 2023-04-27

  The Carbon community has been addressed in the default masculine on Discord
  6+ times, resulting in messages being automatically flagged, so we could send a
  message to explain to senders why their messages were flagged.
  There were also 5 documented cases of the use of otherwise harmful language.
  2 cases happened on Discord, 1 on GitHub and 2 during online meetings.
  These resulted in 6 educational opportunities, 1 message editing/deleting, and
  1 warning.

• “Be kind. Not all of us will agree all the time, but disagreement is
  no excuse for poor behavior and hurtful words. We might all experience some
  frustration now and then, but we cannot allow that frustration to turn into a
  personal attack. It’s important to remember that a community where people feel
  threatened is not a productive one. Members of our community should be
  kind when dealing with other members as well as with people outside the
  Carbon community.”
  Carbon community Code of Conduct, version from 2023-04-27

  There was 1 case of ongoing destructive comments both on Discord and
  GitHub. It was escalated to the Code of Conduct team.
  The user was banned and the disruptive comments were hidden.
  Our moderation team intervened in 1 trolling situation on Discord. After hiding the
  messages and multiple warnings the user was banned.

• “Recognize when progress has stopped, and take a step back.
  Regardless of whether you're trying to resolve a disagreement or anything else,
  think about whether you're making progress. Sometimes messaging doesn't
  give time to think about a situation fully, and repeating positions can make
  people defensive. Step back for a few minutes or hours to think through the
  issue before responding again. Consider pulling in another community member
  to give a fresh perspective. Maybe meet over VC instead. Switching approaches
  can help resume progress.”
  Carbon community Code of Conduct, version from 2023-04-27

  7 conversations on GitHub were deemed off-topic.
  One user escalated these to destructive comments covered above. Otherwise,
  2 users were warned, 1 issue was closed after a warning, and 4 posts were hidden
  or deleted.

• Other interventions

  We clarified that having write access to our GitHub repository, and hence
  being technically able to hide comments, does not make one a moderation team
  member. So, the moderation team will get involved in all conduct related
  interventions.

  Finally, we closed a GitHub discussion in which a logo was posted, in
  agreement with the person who posted it.

Closing observations

The intensity of our manual moderation work has decreased in the last months,
while our AutoMod bots caught more issues. We’ll keep watching and providing
support when needed.

Thank you so much for your contributions, and see you around,

The (exiting) Carbon Language conduct team: our community lead, together
with the Carbon leads 2023-04-27.