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List:       freebsd-announce
Subject:    [FreeBSD-Announce] Initial FreeBSD Core Team comments on concerns about harassment in the FreeBSD co
From:       "George Neville-Neil" <gnn () neville-neil ! com>
Date:       2016-01-03 2:16:16
Message-ID: 4F9B3C84-EA8E-4957-A221-CDB480745A30 () neville-neil ! com
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Dear FreeBSD Community:

There has been significant communication over the last two days relating to Randi \
Harper's recent blog post, which demands an urgent response. First, and to be clear: \
there will be no tolerance for harassment or abusive behavior within the FreeBSD \
Project or its broader community. We encourage any community members aware of \
problems in this regard to contact us immediately.

We take Randi's post and the concerns she (and others) have raised extremely \
seriously. It is important to understand that the ultimate outcome of her complaint, \
and interaction with Core, was the resignation of the party in question's project \
commit rights — a result that respected Randi's specific request that action be \
taken quietly. However, we believe (and agree) that the project has much to learn \
about how best to respond to online abuse and harassment. We will better document our \
procedures — and the changes to them that resulted from this experience. These \
changes in particular will reflect how to earlier and better differentiate conflict \
resolution (for which our procedures are currently tuned) and harassment (which \
demands different procedures). It is clear that there are additional improvements to \
make.

A number of members of the FreeBSD developer community have requested a more detailed \
accounting of the events Randi describes in her article. This will be produced. The \
Core e-mail correspondence involved is quite substantial, and it will take several \
days to sort through to complete a report suitable for distribution. The delay is in \
part because of the necessary confidentiality with which reports of harassment and \
requests for conflict resolution are treated: as a matter of policy, and also, \
commonly, the request of those reporting concerns, they do not appear in published \
Core Reports and hence have not been prepared for distribution. We ask for your \
patience as we prepare this material, which may offer an additional view on events.

A brief comment on the Code of Conduct. The Project's committer guide has long \
required that developers treat each other with respect. Community members will \
hopefully be aware of the more recent (and concrete) Code of Conduct (CoC). This \
document, already under development, was rushed into service (leading to less \
feedback sought than we would have liked) in July 2015 as a result of Randi's report \
— and has since been updated several times following community (and legal) \
feedback. This CoC is critical to both documenting — and enforcing — community \
standards. It is, of necessity, a living document, and in October 2015 we appealed to \
the FreeBSD developer community for volunteers to assist with further improvements. \
We also solicited a number of independent reviewers from broader open-source, \
corporate, and academic communities to assist with updating it further (as well as \
auditing it for implicit bias). The FreeBSD developer community was this week \
(re-)invited to contact the Core Team about joining that committee, which had its \
most recent teleconference in the last week of December.

Please do watch this space for further information in the immediate future. While \
this message was initially prepared for the developer community, it is one that we \
are comfortable with being distributing further. However, the report to be released \
next week will be more suitable for public discussion. You should also feel free to \
get in touch with us individually or collectively with your concerns or suggestions.

The Core Team

PS The previous message has been adapted from a similar message sent to the FreeBSD \
developers mailing list on 2 January 2015. While intended primarily for that \
audience, it is also suitable for the more broad FreeBSD community, and has been \
posted for that reason.


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