Community Participation Guidelines Draft - Community Feedback

Hello Mozillians!

Larissa, and the D&I Team at Mozilla have been busy this year, developing a 2.0 of the Mozilla Community Participation Guidelines(CPG), and we are bringing it to you, Mozilla’s community for feedback.

Diversity & Inclusion helps us achieve our mission:
”To ensure the Internet is a global public resource open and accessible to all.”

The CPG are global guidelines that apply to everyone in the Mozilla community - staff and volunteers. The CPG presents a vision for Mozilla’s community, and lays out behavior expectations, processes to raise concerns, and consequences. The CPG is governed by owners of forums, events and activities supported by Employee Relations and the D&I team.

Please check out our Activate Campaign for more information on how to join the conversation and provide feedback as a contribution.

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CPG’s goal is changing the behaviour of people into being really nice to everyone all the time. Changing behaviour is a hard thing. Many mozillians might be able to read through the CPG and understand their own biases and change their behaviour. But, there will definitely be some who won’t be able to do it on their own. Therefore, I think, the success of CPG will lie on how it will help those who can’t understand their own biases.

For that, a dedicated set of resources might be required to complement the CPG. This might include:

  1. Volunteers who will help/guide people change behaviour.
  2. Guides to help those volunteers to communicate effectively such that people feel like changing their behaviour rather than feeling the urge to resist change.

1 is automatically created if enough people participate in this activity earnestly.
As for 2, I think a page with a lot of examples of how to communicate in a more inclusive language, how to criticize without being hurtful, etc would be helpful.

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Don’t believe that os CPG’s goal. Or atleast if that is a goal then it’s the wrong one (personal opinion). You cannot/should not try to make anything try to look rosy all the time. Life is not carnival, neither are communities.
But CPS’s guidelines are there to prevent it becoming a horror story. It should be more of a deterrent and to keep a peaceful and welcoming environment.

This in my opinion will be the single most horrible thing to happen. They will be percieved as gatekeepers and nobody likes gatekeepers.

Nobody has to change. They just have to realize where the line lies and the consequences of crossing it. Self-awareness id the bane of it. And that cannot be forced/guided. But lines surely can be enforced along with education to what those lines are.

The goal is not about niceness, no. It is about establishing an understood set of parameters for how we treat eachother. We can stil have conflicts, we can utterly disagree, we can express strong opinions, but we also can learn to do that in a way that still respects the dignity of the people involved. That’s the goal.

We do need an educational process and further resources and those are coming. This is a process, not a single point in time. People who are trained and supported to moderate conflict and to educate/provide resources are not gatekeepers, are they? Why would they be? What are they gating?

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So i will cross post something very similar I wrote in response to @asdofindia’s comment in telegram (where conversations get lost, ALWAYS).

Hence the gudilines. So that “should”/assumptions are not there.
We cannot make everyone happy. As soon as we accept and move forward, better for eveyone. Neither I am too much in for making “majority happy”. We (atleast me) isn’t here to make anything happy for anyone(personal opinion). But to make it welcoming enough. And to point out (curtly and sternly if possible) when it’s not welcoming enough (from behind a set of guidelines)

So that we keep on having discussion. Heated debates and even arguments without the fear of being bullied/ridiculed/gaslighted and a lot of other things which are prevalant now

The goals are actually listed on slide nine:
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1NLFwBlm0VSD12DUMt2kBeXctQeKXEYCD3VDEYxREG_c/edit#slide=id.g19970f2c6e_0_84

I think Akshay is right in the terms we want CPG to uplift inclusion and
diversity of as a whole but while it lays out expectations of community
norms the goal is to not to change individual behavior.

Instead it lays out what behaviors are expected, how to report an issue,
and the resolution and consequences of reported issues that are acted upon.

From “Be Respectful”:

Be direct, constructive and positive.

Can one always be positive?

[…] if someone says they have been harmed through your words or actions, listen carefully, apologize sincerely, and correct the behavior going forward.

That assumes that claim is honest.

“Be Inclusive” has a list of items which shouldn’t hinder participation. Indirectly, the first, second-last and last item cover it mostly, but can you add that the most commonly accepted choice as communication channel by community members gets used? After the community meeting here switched to Vidyo, participation dropped fast.

“Disruptive Behavior” has some bullet points with leading whitespaces. “Instigating” also has one.

“Violation of these guidelines can result in you being ask to leave” should be “asked”.

"Please also report to us if you observe ": two whitespaces between “us” and “if”; same for “if it is the weekend) if you” and “the Ubuntu Code of Conduct, Mozilla’s View Source Conference” and “WisCon code of conduct. This document”.

Rust’s CoC is not linked.

WisCon’s CoC is linked but not underlined.

The document is rather lengthy (7 pages), can you put something like a summary how to behave on top (which e.g. doesn’t like the examples what would be a discrimination and also has no details on reporting)? Because it also applies to online spaces, new contributors will get in contact with it rather early.

If you can get a non-native English speaker who has experience with formal/legal documents to review it and suggest changes for a simple English, this would be helpful (e.g. “perpetuity” is rarely used; often the meaning can be understood from the context; some German speaking Mozillians don’t use Bugzilla because they don’t have confidence in their English).

Thank you

Thank you for your feedback. Edits of a grammatical or syntactical nature are noted.

I would say that “positive” does not mean “nice” it means open and respectful and assumption first of good intent. In fact, in a diverse environment, conflict can be the norm, and given that it is done respectfully, its a very generative thing, creating new ideas, etc.

i have struggled already to edit this down but the issue of length is noted. A tl:dr type section at the top is a good idea.

I would not say that the CPG is a place to govern what kind of communication tool is used, but a suggestion that the preferred tool of the community is a good one to use, that we could add either here or possibly in an associated best practices guide.

Thank you!

I completely agree with the point that we need volunteers to guide the upcoming volunteers and also the present one. We can have a set of volunteers in every sub community, who will guide the other volunteers and solve all their queries.

I’ve finally had time to review the CPG. Generally, I agree with the content and couldn’t make any suggestions in terms of missing content. Also, I’ve learned quite a few new English words :slight_smile: However, I have the following questions and observations:

Keep Private Matters Separate from Participation
Some Mozillians may identify with activities or organizations that do not support the same inclusion and diversity standards as Mozilla. When this is the case:
a) Support for exclusionary practices must not be carried into Mozilla activities.
b) Support for exclusionary practices in non-Mozilla activities should not be expressed in Mozilla spaces (which extends to Mozilla-hosted events, even if not in our spaces).
© If (a) and (b) are met, other Mozillians should treat this as a private matter, not a Mozilla issue.

I’m not sure I understand that part. Could somebody try to explain this to me before I give feedback on it?

These guidelines work in conjunction with our Anti-Harassment/Discrimination Policy, which sets out protections for, and obligations of, Mozilla employees. The Anti-Harassment/Discrimination Policy is crafted with specific legal definitions and requirements in mind.

Do these guidelines only matter for employees? Are there any parts in there that are not currently covered by the CPG draft but might be valuable to include?

After reading further down: it seems those only apply to employees. As this is mentioned further down, I might suggest to remove the first occurrence to not have a duplicate paragraph.

Think about how you might facilitate alternate ways to contribute or participate. If you find yourself dominating a discussion, step back. Make way for other voices and listen actively to them.

As this paragraph is not indented, I’m not sure where that belongs to. If it belongs to the previous paragraph about “Be inclusive”, I think those points were already made before the bullet point list and that paragraph might be a duplicate.

Sustained disruption of events, forums, or meetings, including talks and presentations, will not be tolerated. This includes: …

Question for others: do you think this paragraph includes interrupting somebody when they are speaking? I had to look up “heckle” to come to a conclusion of “yes, it does” for me.

Grammar notes
And some suggestions regarding grammar (not a native English speaker, so my suggestions might be wrong):

  • Double space before “It doesn’t matter how you identify yourself…”
  • "These guidelines exist to enable diverse individuals and groups interact and collaborate to mutual advantage. " --> “These guidelines exist to enable diverse individuals and groups to interact and collaborate to mutual advantage.”
  • “Participating in Mozilla offsites and trainings.” -> no other bullet list item has a period at the end, this one has
  • “can result in you being ask to leave an event” -> “can result in you being asked to leave an event”

I think the goal can be summarised as “be excellent to each other” – not just decent, excellent.

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Thank you very much for your reception!
I’m new here and I am happy to be here!
I want to help Mozilla and people around the world.
I am a lawyer, an account, an university teacher and an Information System’s student. I’m in the Information’s System graduation.
I work with digital and tax law.
I also work in social projects in Brazil.
So, I want to offer my knowledges to help Mozilla in your projects.
We need to know and respect each other around the world, and I want to help mozillians to do this.
Thank you, everybody!
Best regards,

Antonio Carlos Barragan.

1 Like

April 10th version:

“but everyone needs to take recognize one’s native culture is only part of positive interactions.”

This appears to have got a bit mangled in the editing?

What I understand is, if your own personal belief and opinions clash with what Mozilla as an organization and community believes. You are NOT free to act on your beliefs solely when you are within Mozilla Space or in a position to influence other Mozillians. @lshapiro can explain if this is the case