Online Community Working Group #23
Conversation
Ideas
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I just wanted to say: great initiative. I'm not sure I will have enough time to dedicate to joining the group, but on the off chance I end up on the board I'd be happy to be the board liaison for my term.
I also left specific comments. Anything I didn't comment on LGTM I think :)
active/community.md
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| The Forum and the Discord are core parts of the overall community and those that help and moderate these platforms take significant time from their day to help others. We can support them through training and taking action to make their lives easier. | ||
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| The broad goals of the group are: | ||
| - facilitate and centralise discussion between moderators and admins on the various platforms |
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I wonder how much input you can get from people (e.g. me) that are admins on the Discord while they're not in the group themselves. But I imagine everyone is happy to share, and ideally some group members would have reasonable access levels to at least the mod only sections for example.
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I don't think we need all admins/moderators to be part of the working group 👍
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Agreed that not all admins/moderators need to be a part of the group, but I would prefer representation and input from those groups.
active/community.md
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| - What actions are you proposing the WG be allowed to take directly? | ||
| - Creation and management of processes related to community platforms. | ||
| - Adding/removing moderators & other roles |
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I'm a bit wary of delegating this. I think what we have done with the Discord has worked well so far and I'm not sure people would be happy with having mods "imposed" on them.
I'm not so sure about the forum. One issue is that I think only Andrew has full access, right?
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That's fair, I could have worded this better, but initial idea was to simply formalize what we already do with a tiny bit more regularity. ie having the WG prompt the mod teams to review any new moderators, ask if anyone wants to step down at regular periods (eg 6 months)
Definitely not going to be imposing anyone on any community
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In this section, the delegation we want to focus on is what the board would normally ought to do, that this group could do instead. So perhaps this can be worded as:
| - Adding/removing moderators & other roles | |
| - Proposals to add/remove moderators & other roles |
Or possibly taken to another section altogether. The other two points below aren’t really current board remits either.
active/community.md
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| - Creation and management of processes related to community platforms. | ||
| - Adding/removing moderators & other roles | ||
| - Training for moderators | ||
| - Ensuring moderation is consistent across teams and platforms |
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I don't think this can be ensured, but we should still strive.
One issue I think is that Discord skews quite gen Z and especially quite "online" people. I think we tolerate (and probably should, with some guidance for them) things there that probably wouldn't in other places. Personally I find this to be a strength but it has been one of the constant problems. There is a constant tension between people wanting me to ban people and when I do ban people, people telling me I'm doing a bad job for banning them. Which is weird because I only ever banned one person for a CoC violation in the first place. You can probably tell this is a bit of a sore spot so I do think something should be done here.
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I think this starts with producing actionable guidance and some transparency on how we go about about moderation. This guidance does need to take into account the nuances of each platform and what is natural about each of them.
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I think I mostly agree that sensitivity to context is important, and that there are behaviors that would be fine in one place and not in another. Like, a common communication pattern in real-time chat platforms is to
make a longer point
spread out over several messages
one at a time
kinda thinking it through as you go
making a lot of short posts.
That's, like, completely fine in Discord or Slack or whatever, but if someone were to do that on the forum, consistently, or here in Github, we'd probably find it pretty annoying and at some point someone probablly should ask them to conform a bit more to the norms of the platform.
But on the other hand, thiis needs to have some limits. Context does mater, but only to a point. There are certainly corners of the Discord community where, for example, homophobic slurs are common. That's pretty clearly not OK in official Django spaces.
I was super happy to see this proposal because it seems to be like this group could be a place where these lines can get hashed out. Starting with some core agreed-upon principles that then can be massaged for different contexts seems super cool to me.
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Yes, completely agreed (although typing
like this
also annoys me on
Discord and Slack
) :)
active/community.md
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| Suggestions: | ||
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| - Private Channel in the Discord Server and private category in the forum. |
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Just a note here that I and a few others (whoever was in the ops team a few years ago, but not up to date, so e.g. Florian still has powers but Baptiste not) can see all private channels. This is unlikely to be an issue unless you're talking about someone who can see it, but just to be aware.
Co-authored-by: Tom Carrick <[email protected]>
active/community.md
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| The Forum and the Discord are core parts of the overall community and those that help and moderate these platforms take significant time from their day to help others. We can support them through training and taking action to make their lives easier. | ||
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| The broad goals of the group are: | ||
| - facilitate and centralise discussion between moderators and admins on the various platforms |
There was a problem hiding this comment.
I don't think we need all admins/moderators to be part of the working group 👍
active/community.md
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| - I'm unsure what power's might be delegated, if any. Board members would need to input into this. | ||
| - Admin privileges to members of the forum & Discord or existing admin representive joining as a member. |
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I think these spaces have worked independently as a while being "non-official", so with that in mind...
I think this group (in coordination with the DSF) should be able to grant a space the "official" Django community status considering we might exist on new platforms in the future.
[In order to do that, I think there must be some set of guidelines in place (needs moderation for example)]
I also think it would be great if this group can help "retire" an online community that is no longer maintained or meets the guidelines
I think any community which has been approved by the working group should have a place linked on the website
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1000% this! Succession of platforms was one thing on my mind for this group with the recent drop off in the use of mailing lists.
active/community.md
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| With regards to Django Software Foundation responsibilities and resources, the group operates with: | ||
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| - I'm unsure what power's might be delegated, if any. Board members would need to input into this. | ||
| - Admin privileges to members of the forum & Discord or existing admin representive joining as a member. |
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I don't see much delegated powers, either; this group seems more of a place for a community of practice than a group that needs to act on behalf of the board.
I s'pose at some point we could transition the budget for paying for Discourse to the group directly (and in theory Discord though I don't think we pay for anything there right?) -- that seems fine to me, but also it's such a minor thing it doesn't really matter where it lays imo.
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For Discord, I pay around ~$6 monthly to run a bot on Digital Ocean. It's arguable whether it's worth having or not as we have another (free) bot that does more stuff. But I would like to use it for more things, just, well, time :) - I'm happy to keep paying for it myself anyway.
One other thing we could consider is paying for boosts. These are like a yearly subscription more or less. If you buy nitro (kind of premium status) for your account you can boost a server. And then you can buy extra boosts. At the moment there are 12 people boosting the server, including me. This has varied and mostly increased over time. To keep the server at level 3, which has some benefits, we'd need 14. So there is perhaps a case to pay for some boosts. The most interesting thing we really gain from this is having a custom invite link, which I think would look something like https://discord.gg/django - which is a bit easier on the eyes than the current invite links we use (e.g. on the website). It's quite expensive at around (for me) €35 per year per boost. Worth it? Probably not, but good to keep in mind.
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Arguably it's moral to pay for the utilities we use if we have the ability to.
Co-authored-by: Sarah Boyce <[email protected]>
Co-authored-by: Sarah Boyce <[email protected]>
Co-authored-by: Sarah Boyce <[email protected]>
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Thanks for the feedback! Any suggestions for who to prod nicely on the forum admin & moderator teams to input into this? |
I think @andrewgodwin might be an admin and @KenWhitesell might be a moderator |
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I think this sounds like a great idea. As the (very newly elected) Chair of the Code of Conduct WG I wanted to say we are happy to help in any way we can. |
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Thank you @nanorepublica! This is looking close to ready for board review – what’s your plan to add more interested members?
Re the Django forum, admins and moderators are listed on the forum about page.
For board review, I would recommend aiming for the January or February board meetings, as we have new board members starting in mid-December.
active/community.md
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| - What actions are you proposing the WG be allowed to take directly? | ||
| - Creation and management of processes related to community platforms. | ||
| - Adding/removing moderators & other roles |
There was a problem hiding this comment.
In this section, the delegation we want to focus on is what the board would normally ought to do, that this group could do instead. So perhaps this can be worded as:
| - Adding/removing moderators & other roles | |
| - Proposals to add/remove moderators & other roles |
Or possibly taken to another section altogether. The other two points below aren’t really current board remits either.
active/community.md
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| With regards to Django Software Foundation responsibilities and resources, the group operates with: | ||
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| - Admin privileges to members of the forum & Discord or existing admin representive joining as a member. |
There was a problem hiding this comment.
I think it’d be good to be clear whether this is intended for all members to have those privileges, or only some. It’ll be trickier to get people involved with this group if there has to be enough vetting to make sure people are trustworthy admins. So personally I’d recommend moving this as a "nice-to-have" for group members.
active/community.md
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| - Co-Chair: TBD | ||
| - Board Liaison (must be an active Board member; may be the same as Chair/Co-Chair): TBD | ||
| - Other members: | ||
| - Andrew Miller |
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We have struggled a lot with other groups in selecting a Chair and Co-Chair, so just a heads’up this might go quite a bit faster if you just volunteer yourself for it. We’d be lucky to have you!
Re Board Liaison – we’ll have four new board members starting soon, who might be interested in this.
Re other members – please let folks know once you think you’re ready to start adding? We’ve sent a few people towards this proposal as part of the DSF board elections.
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I've been a bit busy of late, but now that I have caught up to a bunch of stuff...
Re Board Liaison – we’ll have four new board members starting soon, who might be interested in this.
I'm going to quote @knyghty who is hopefully still interested here:
I'm not sure I will have enough time to dedicate to joining the group, but on the off chance I end up on the board I'd be happy to be the board liaison for my term.
Tom, I hope you are still interested :)
Re other members – please let folks know once you think you’re ready to start adding? We’ve sent a few people towards this proposal as part of the DSF board elections.
As a fellow Discord moderator and DSF member, I would be more than happy to join this WG, if you'll have me.
We have struggled a lot with other groups in selecting a Chair and Co-Chair
+1 to Andy as chair. If possible, a co-chair from another community would probably be good (currently, I guess that means the forums; I am curious whether Reddit should also be involved).
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In terms of Reddit, that is definitely a possibility, however I would want to have a conversation with the Social Media WG as per this post as to whether Reddit is a social media site or a community platform. Essentially I would like to see a clear ownership of different online spaces so that communication doesn't get confused both internally and externally.
Co-authored-by: Thibaud Colas <[email protected]>
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Hi @nanorepublica, thanks for the ping on the Forum 👍 I'm not sure I have too much to say here. I do think that having some/better communication on moderation would be good. It can feel a bit isolated when having to decide whether something needs action or not. Forum mods do already reach out to each other to discuss, but having a closer relationship with the CoC committee would be valuable I think. (It shouldn't feel like a super escalation to reach out for input.) I think that probably is better handled under the scope of the CoC WG though maybe, to keep things contained to a smaller number of more active WGs?
There's a big single item project that comes to mind reading this, to improve the website community sections, that I think are still linking to the old Google Group mailing lists (or were last time I checked). Similarly to the above, does that fall under the (proposed?) website WG, or can it just be handled as a ticket on GitHub? IDK, but it's not an ongoing kind of thing once done I suspect. So, reading those two half-thoughts, I think I've missed some of what you're reaching for here. 🤔 |
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Hi @carltongibson thanks for the thoughts. I can understand where you are coming from and it might be that the forum needs less work overall from a moderation perspective. The intention here is provide process and nudges for succession planning so you could take a break from moderation if you wanted or nudges to invite others to be moderators. There are also features/plugins (which is more for the admins) that we could be evaluating to improve the forum experience. Finally regarding the website, I would expect the WG to help take point on the kind of issues you mentioned to get them done and focus on evolving those sections of the website as well. |
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Thanks for the reply @nanorepublica. Those points make sense, yes. 👍 |
This is my initial draft.
Would you be interested in joining this and helping improve our online community spaces?