Thinking about how to improve code of conduct

[cspencerjones]

I love that this document exists! Thanks to those who put it together. But I think it's got 2 problems at the moment:
a) It's not easy to find on the pangeo site. Is there any way we can display it in a more obvious place?
b) If you report, it is not at all clear who sees the report. So I think people could be worried that they are reporting harassment to a committee that includes their harasser, or allies of that person. I guess this is alluded to in #7

I also wonder if it's worth trying to have some contact people who are not the code of conduct committee so that people have options?

I am not saying that there is harassment going on, but it's something we need to be vigilant about as the community grows.

[jhamman]

Hi @cspencerjones. Fully agree with all of your points here.

We should add some direct links to the governance documents on our website. Or, better yet, pull docs from this repo into the site itself. I'd love to see pangeo.io/conduct be a page on our site. I, for one, would fully support anyone who takes this on.

The current conduct email goes to five members of the steering council. @jhamman, @amanda-tan, @chiaral, @rsignell-usgs, and @rabernat. Ideally, this list would not be a single subset of the steering council as it is now. Suggestions on how to think about membership of this group are welcome.

[chiaral]

Hi @cspencerjones - I also agree with everything. I created the document, after self educating myself a bit and looking at various repo's CoC and other websites such as WWcode. Please feel free to make any comments to it if you see something missing! It was just a first attempt.

I believe the subset of people was chosen because those were the members of the initial council, which has grown since then? I think we could list the names so that they know whom the email reaches? If I remember correctly no website I looked at had the actual list of names. I can check again, and see how it is implemented in other similar repos.

Also I agree that in a way whoever receives the email is possibly "shielded" by possible complaints. I am not sure how you go around that. I think that would always be true. The more people you have on the receiving end, I think, the less probable is that they are all at fault, so that is a good thing to have. Also, we do have a conflict of interest section in the enforcement document, maybe we can make more prominent and repeat it in the Code of Conduct after the reporting paragraph. But I really am not sure how you could make that more explicit, besides essentially trusting that it will happen.

[rsignell-usgs]

The USGS addresses this issue by having a Peer Support Worker Program. These folks are volunteers. Perhaps we could see if we have people in our community who would like to volunteer to play a similar role? I know these folks take training. Could investigate more if we think this would be a useful path.

[chiaral]

@rsignell-usgs Thanks! yes if you can investigate that could be helpful. At least we would have a possible solution.

[maxrjones]

Related to the ease of finding the code of conduct, it would be nice to move or duplicate the code of conduct to https://github.com/pangeo-data/.github/CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md if this is meant to apply to all repositories in the pangeo-data GitHub organization. This would make the code of conduct show up in the GitHub sidebar for all the repositories.

For context, I would like to add a code of conduct to https://github.com/pangeo-data/xbatcher. Setting a org-wide code of conduct seems better than duplicating https://github.com/pangeo-data/governance/blob/master/conduct/code_of_conduct.md into that repository because any updates would not need to be made in multiple places.

[jhamman]

I think setting up the pangeo-data/.github repo is a great idea @maxrjones.

How can we make sure the the code of conduct stays synchronized between the two repositories?

[maxrjones]

I think setting up the pangeo-data/.github repo is a great idea @maxrjones.

How can we make sure the the code of conduct stays synchronized between the two repositories?

Here are a couple options:

1. Rather than having the full content in both repositories, have a very short CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md in one of the repos that links to the full code of conduct in the other repository (e.g., https://github.com/pangeo-data/xbatcher/blob/main/CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md)
2. Create a GitHub workflow that runs weekly, checks for any differences between the two files, and opens an issue in governance if there are differences. This would still require manual intervention to re-synchronize the files.

[jhamman]

Rather than having the full content in both repositories, have a very short CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md in one of the repos that links to the full code of conduct in the other repository (e.g., https://github.com/pangeo-data/xbatcher/blob/main/CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md)

This seems much simpler. I would suggest putting the full code of conduct in the .github repo so it gets picked up for the full org.

[jhamman]

I've gone ahead and duplicated the CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md file in the .github repo. After thinking about this a bit more, I'm not too concerned about having two copies of this file. We haven't updated it in years -- that's what this issue is about and I'm not saying we shouldn't make some of the proposed updates -- so I don't think there is much risk of the two copies getting out of sync.