Carbon Language community transparency report through 2023-09-30

[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 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

It’s now been over a year since Carbon’s existence was publicly revealed, and we’ve
been building our community in the open since then. We have currently over 4,100
people signed up on our Discord server and around 130 contributors on GitHub.

Our moderation team size is currently 13 mods, including our Code of Conduct
team members, contributing from 3 different continents.

The Code of Conduct team is getting the support and guidance of our community lead,
who is a professional inclusion specialist.

We also get help from our AutoMod bots, which are automatically catching the use
of some harmful language and spam.
In this period, they have blocked 1 message, and flagged 6. And there have been
5 other documented conduct-related incidents.
One situation was brought to the attention of the Code of Conduct team in that period.

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

Our interventions from 2023-07-01 through 2023-09-30

The moderation team is running biweekly meetups and an internal book club to
expand their knowledge.
The book club went on hiatus for the summer though.

These are the conduct incidents that were brought to our attention in the 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 2023-10-31

  The Carbon community has been addressed in the default masculine on Discord
  7+ times, resulting in messages being automatically flagged 6 times. We contacted
  their authors and explained why their messages were flagged. One of the users
  was banned after keeping the same language using sock puppet accounts.

• “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 2023-10-31

An exchange with a user who kept using derogatory language after we offered
friendlier wording alternatives, and complaining about our community standards
resulted in a warning.
A second user was banned after joining that exchange with destructive comments.
Also, another user was educated about how we want contributions and criticism
to be as constructive as possible.

• “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 2023-10-31

  2 conversations were deemed off-topic. One on GitHub, one on Discord.
  The moderation team helped find a more adequate way to contribute in both.

• Other interventions

  There was a report to the conduct team about people sharing content by a
  person banned for serious code of conduct violations. The conduct team’s work
  on this was not resolved by the end of the quarter. We will get this done in Q4.

Closing observations

The intensity of our manual moderation work has been lower in Q3 than in Q2.
Our AutoMod bots also caught less issues. So, the summer has been pretty
quiet for our moderation team.
We’ll keep watching and providing support when needed, and are hoping for
more contributions while keeping the atmosphere friendly and kind.

Thank you very much for your contributions, good spirits and see you around!

The Carbon Code of Conduct team, 2023-10-31.