Clarify foundation-wide impact of Code of Conduct violations in one project

[tobie]

Should consequences (e.g. a ban) of a code of conduct violation in one project be extended foundation-wise?

If so, how is that communicated?

[tobie]

/cc @eemeli

[eemeli]

This needs to also be considered together with openjs-foundation/cross-project-council#418, as that update brings in explicit enforcement guidance. In particular, the temporary and permanent bans forbid "interaction or public communication with the community". The issue here is that we're not clear on the scope of "community", i.e. do we consider each project to form their own communities, or are all participants in all projects part of one community.

[tobie]

Indeed. And as you're suggesting this might force us fork the contributor covenant to clarify that.

[mhdawson]

My understanding of the discussion/documentation up to this point is that it has been on the basis that each project enforced the CoC for it's spaces. It would be an extension/addition to have bans be greater than a single project.

I think getting a feeling of where each project would stand on the idea could be a good starting point.

[mcollina]

I'm -1 on having Foundation-wide bans enacted without providing enough context and details to the various projects. I think we should have a project-friendly approach instead and provide a recommendation / info in the case of serious offenders.

[eemeli]

Agreed with @mcollina. The proposal I ended up making during the CoC discussion at the summit was that we would expand the role of the COCP to act as a communication pathway, such that when a project is considering taking action in response to a possible CoC violation, they would be in touch with the panel, which could then inform them of any prior history with other projects.

An extension of that then would be allowing in extreme cases for the panel to communicate pro-actively with projects about particularly troublesome individuals, essentially fulfilling the ask in this issue without removing autonomy from individual projects.

[mcollina]

I would make it optional: each project can connect to the COCP if they'd like to share. Most cases are not worthwhile of being shared there.

[ljharb]

I don’t think it should be mandatory that a project ban anyone another project has, but i would like, ideally, the option to ban anyone another project has - ie, I’d like to see a policy of sharing/notification across projects’ moderation groups.

[indexzero]

Sharing across moderation teams makes a lot of sense. Perhaps funding (or facilitating) shared moderation tools could help facilitate that. I know it's a world of ETOOMANYSLACKS but lack last I checked Slack does provide free options for 501(c) organizations for up to a few hundred members. Given moderation itself is distinctly separate in most cases could make sense.

Up to the moderators doing that hard work though of course.

[jorydotcom]

transferring issue to /code-of-conduct per CPC meeting on 12 May