Carbon Language community transparency report through 2023-06-30

[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 regular basis is helping us track progress
and hold ourselves accountable to high standards of community culture.

Summary

It’s now been a year since Carbon’s existence became public, and we’ve been
building our community in the open since then. We have currently over 4.600 people
signed up on our Discord server and around 125 contributors on GitHub.

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

The Carbon leads have now fully handed conduct work to the new conduct team.
We now have a clearer separation between our technical and community leadership,
although the Carbon leads are still very much engaging with the community.
The new Code of Conduct team is also 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 2 messages, and flagged 8. And there have been
17 other documented conduct-related incidents.
That means 27+ such incidents were taken care of by our moderation team, in one
way or another.
No case has been escalated to or dealt with by the Code of Conduct team directly
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 2023-04-01 through 2023-06-30

The moderation team is running biweekly meetups and an internal book club to
expand their knowledge.
The book club focussed on recognizing oppressive structures in organizations in
Q2 2023.

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 2023-07-28

  The Carbon community has been addressed in the default masculine on Discord
  6+ times, resulting in messages being automatically flagged, so we could contact
  their authors and explain why their messages were flagged.
  There was also 1 documented case of the use of ableist language during a video call.
  These incidents resulted in 3 educational opportunities and one warning. Other cases
  proved to feed into otherwise trolling behavior and users were banned.

• “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 2023-07-28

  and:

• “Be careful in the words that we choose and be kind to others.
  Do not use insults or put downs. Harassment and other exclusionary behaviors aren’t
  acceptable. This includes, but is not limited to:
  ___ Violent threats or language directed against another person.
  ___ Discriminatory jokes and language.
  ___ Posting sexually explicit or violent material.
  ___ Posting, or threatening to post, other people’s personally identifying information
  without their explicit permission ("doxing").
  ___ Personal insults, especially those using racist or sexist terms.
  ___ Unwelcome sexual attention.
  ___ Advocating for, or encouraging, any of the above behavior.
  ___ In general, if someone asks you to stop, then stop. Persisting after being asked
  to stop is considered harassment.”
  Carbon community Code of Conduct, version from 2023-07-28

  Our moderation team intervened in 6 trolling situations on Discord, some of them
  including insults, 1 on them targeting one of our team members directly.
  All corresponding users were banned, as well as the sock puppet accounts they
  registered after the original ban.

• “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 2023-07-28

  4 conversations on GitHub were deemed off-topic.
  1 conversation turned into an educational opportunity, 1 user was warned, and
  off-topic comments were hidden.
  Otherwise, 3 users were sending pull requests on GitHub to spam our repository,
  1 stopped after a warning, the other 2 were banned.

• Other interventions

  We restricted the use of the new “Sound Board” feature on Discord to the
  moderators.
  Also, our new conduct team members participated in a Code of Conduct training.
  Finally, we started discussing how we want to deal with LLM generated
  “contributions” in our repository.

Closing observations

The intensity of our manual moderation work has been equal to that of the previous
quarter, while our AutoMod bots caught way less issues, and our Code of Conduct
team did not need to intervene as such.
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!

Our community lead, together with our new Code of Conduct team
and the Carbon leads 2023-07-28.