Discussion regarding Community Working Group and/or Ombudsman

[Toshio Kuratomi]

On Tue, May 10, 2011 at 07:17:59PM -0400, Brian Pepple wrote:
> 
> When the CWG was formed, it given a one year term with the initial
> goal of determining whether a COC/enforcement guidelines were needed,
> and then afterwards work on helping to maintain a friendly and
> welcoming community.

I'm sorry, I didn't due my due diligence before the meeting.  The CWG was
chartered before I joined the Board and I should have looked into what was
docuemented at it's founding.

here's that document for those that are interested:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Community_working_group

The charter is pretty clear that the Code of Conduct is just one aspect of
the Community Working Group's mission.

> Sadly, somewhere along line, the Board felt the
> CWG wasn't need any longer and started discussing disbanding it.

I was also on vacation for the previous couple of Board Meetings where
the first drafts of the Code of Conduct and Code of Conduct Enforcement
documents were discussed.

When comparing previous drafts to the current one and the discussion on FAB
that lead to the changes, I see that there is a pattern of Board members
thinking that the Community Working Group was founded to create the Code of
Conduct.  As stated earlier, this seems to be a mistaken impression.

At the last Board Meeting it seemed that the Board members were thinking
that the Community Working Group had fulfilled the task (singular) that it
was chartered for which left up in the air what it wanted to do next.  I did
not get the impression that anyone on the Board wanted to disband the
Community Working Group because they didn't want it to continue existing,
they were just confused as to what purpose it wanted to fill once the Code
of Conduct was written.


> Regardless, it would have been nice to have been invited to these
> discussions, instead of finding out about them afterwards (which
> frankly, doesn't inspire much confidence in me about how they will
> handle COC enforcements in the future).
> 
If there were other discussions about disbanding the Community Working Group
above what's available in the public record, I don't think I have more
information than you do.  The last phone meeting seemed to just be
a misunderstanding of what the Community Working Group charter had stated
and where the Community Working Group members themselves wanted to take
things next.

On that note, the Board had some ideas about directions the Community Working
Group could take based solely on the Code of Conduct (not on the charter).
However, they weren't sure if the CWG was interested in doing any of those
things or if they were solely interested in the Code of Conduct.

From the vehemence with which you point to the charter, it seems apparent
that the Community Working Group wants to continue to do more work.  Do you
have ideas that you want to throw out there of roles and tasks that the CWG
wants to fill?  I'll add the Board's couple ideas as a reply to David
Nalley's email and you can read that before or after giving some of your own
thoughts.

-Toshio
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