[Osmf-talk] [OSM-talk] Call to Take Action and Confront Systemic Offensive Behavior in the OSM Community

[Robert Kaiser]

Allan Mustard schrieb:
>      We have asked the Local Chapters and Communities Working Group
>      (LCCWG ) to take the lead on this and to work with signatories of
>      the open letter to the Board [1] as well as members of the Diversity
>      and Inclusion Special Committee to produce proposals for the Board
>      to consider at its January meeting.  The LCCWG has accepted this
>      task.  This issue will be on the agenda of the January meeting of
>      the Board of Directors, exact time and date yet to be determined,
>      though as is customary it will be posted to the Foundation's website
>      well in advance.

Thanks for taking this on, I think it's good to have a set of rules or 
guidelines written down - and enforced - so all people participating in 
the community can feel to be in a safe space when taking part in any 
actions and discussions.

Many of us feel like we should not need a CoC or similar because it 
should be common sense to treat everyone else with respect and don't 
discriminate against other groups or minorities, and I agree that it 
SHOULD not be necessary to have such rules - but reality unfortunately 
shows that there are people who end up undermining that common sense and 
then you actually need such an instrument. Also, due to bad experiences 
in their past, a number of people in underrepresented groups tend to not 
feel safe if they don't know if such a framework exists and will be 
enforced if necessary.

We had those discussions years ago in the Mozilla community as well, and 
we ended up with a document that I think is really good, and also 
managed to avoid the "code of conduct" name that feels pretty 
indoctrinating to some people, while still being very clear about what 
this all means, the name we ended up with is "Community Participation 
Guidelines". Note that I strongly believe that any such framework isn't 
worth much if there is no enforcement, so let's make sure we define that 
for OSM when we go into this - the Mozilla document has the 
surface-level information for that in the "Consequences" and "Reporting" 
sections - it's of course important to have a defined process of how to 
treat reports and how they lead to said consequences.

The Mozilla document is here in its current version: 
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/governance/policies/participation/

(Note: I am a long-term Mozilla community member, but just like in the 
OSM community, I'm not in any relevant power position there, I've just 
been a discussion participant when those guidelines were first designed.)

I hope this can help as a constructive input to this topic.

Cheers,
KaiRo