At last year’s AGM, someone raised a concern I’d paraphrase as “what if what happened to Sonny happens again”? At the time we were reassured that CoC reform was planned, and that Sonny’s case was so special, it’s unlikely that it will ever happen again.
However, just a few weeks later something similar did happen again. Another well-liked person who was vocal about the same kinds of reforms as Sonny suddenly disappeared from the Foundation without explanation (Steven, the ED at the time). While we don’t know what happened in detail, the situation was more than a little reminiscent of the one from a year earlier. This, along with the fact that there has been no personnel turnover at the CoC committee over the past few years (AFAIK since 2024 two new members joined, none left), does not give the impression that things have changed.
As candidates in this year’s election, how do you want to reform the CoC committee and procedures to regain the community’s trust? Beyond technical changes to procedures (e.g. term limits, appeals processes, more oversight), how do you plan to restore confidence in the CoC committee as a fair and neutral institution? How will you asssess that those measures have succeeded?
It’s my view that the situation with Steven was very different to the one with Sonny.
Regarding CoC reform (and conduct arrangements more generally in GNOME), there is a plan to run a community consultation around conduct arrangements in GNOME, which we’ve done some initial work on, and we have some budget that can be used to make that happen. It’s already been discussed with the committee, who are enthusiastic. We were hoping to run the consultation prior to the election, but with one thing or another, it didn’t happen. The next window is likely after the summer, in September.
The aim would be to let everyone in the community give input, come up with a list of recommendations, get more feedback, then implement the changes. Ideally all that would happen within a fixed time line.
I’m sorry that it didn’t happen sooner. I had genuinely wanted to work in this area, but if you read my updates you’ll know that we’ve been pretty busy.
I have direct personal experience with exactly this problem. In a trade union I was involved with, a disciplinary process was handled with no transparency whatsoever (members had no idea the committee had been convened, and no idea a decision had been reached). When I was later elected to the executive committee, I learned the actual reasons for the exclusion and I srongly believed they were entirely justified. Yet I pushed for those reasons to be disclosed, and was refused. That refusal, protecting a correct decision behind a wall of silence, did more damage to trust than transparency would ever have done. Even when the right call was made, nobody could know it.
This is what opacity costs and it is why I believe in radical transparency as a default.
Concretely, this means the community should always know how many procedures are currently before the CoC committee, and the status of each one. The transparency reports are already a very good start, needing to be enhanced this way. This matters because if everyone already knows a procedure is underway and understands its broad outlines, it becomes impossible to quietly bury an outcome or refuse to account for a decision. Transparency upstream makes accountability downstream unavoidable. I also support term limits and staggered rotation for CoC committee members, no oversight body can remain credible without regular renewal.
I am aware this creates real risks in an organization like ours, where many things are public and written and individuals could easily be identified, both the person raising a concern and the person being investigated. Protective measures will be necessary, and I take that seriously. But the solution is, I think, only a careful design.
Finally, I propose that at each AGM, members elect an independent oversight committee (drawn from Foundation members who are not Board member) with the mandate to audit CoC (also finance, why not) processes and produce a yearly report on all actions taken and how the committee has functioned. That report would be submitted to and approved by the AGM. I recognize this would likely require amending the bylaws, as I see no mention of it already.
The measure of success is simple: the next time something difficult happens, the Foundation explains what process was followed and the community can verify it.
In my current organisation, I am on a committee designed to prevent and redress incidents of sexual and other forms of harassment (a legal requirement). I have attended in-person workshops to be on this committee and have also conducted training for my colleagues. There are clearly defined guidelines (internally public) to be followed when a complaint is made. This includes forwarding the complaint to the subject of the complaint (respondent), and giving them time to respond.
Concerns have been raised that some respondents were not adequately informed of the allegations against them, and therefore had no opportunity to present their position. If true, this should be addressed. While it is important to protect privacy and sensitive details, an investigation that concludes without consulting the individuals directly involved is incomplete.
In addition, a key priority would be broadening and strengthening the pool of candidates eligible to serve on the Code of Conduct Committee. The ED, President and Vice-President can already serve as temporary members. With appropriate training, this list can be expanded further to include more community members.
Finally, for more serious cases, a member with relevant experience in governance, mediation etc. (external to the Foundation) can be involved to ensure neutrality.
The consultation that Allan referred to is a good opportunity for us to get feedback on other measures we can take to bridge the trust gap that exists at the moment.
This seems like it is going to repeat the same mistakes as when the CoC was created. Back then, a closed-door committee was formed (I was part of it). In my experience, it was utterly impossible to have a discussion because everyone was going in with an agenda. And, in the end I was blamed for slowing down the process and wanting to discuss things in more depth.
Doing a Consultation and then drafting in the existing Committee is an approach that looks nice on the surface, but moves the decision making behind closed doors and out of the community. If you want something fair, then call on everyone to draft proposals and then have a wider vote between all of them in the community. I strongly believe that is the only way to do this properly in the current situation.
Back to what happened. The fact that I got blamed does not really surprise me, if you have a single person with a dissenting opinion, then obviously it’ll feel like that person is the problem. Like you cannot actually have a discussion with that person and they are the reason for slowing things down. Especially from the outside, it can be next to impossible to tell what is going on and who to side for. Everyone is going to make some mistakes in such a conflict, so it highly depends on the type of mistakes that are made, their frequency and the ability to actually try to resolve the conflict.
Now, my opinion on this is clear, and I have a number of reasons to say this. For anyone wanting to dig, there was a really angry email from me about the subject. I did not dig it up now, but I am pretty sure I meant everything that is said (and possibly not directly) there. Honestly, that whole experience broke me and, together with a number of similar stories, was a large factor why I eventually ran away from the GNOME Foundation in particular, but also GNOME in general. Even though I organized GUADEC 2016, liked the work in general and also a number of the people in the community. Honestly, I absolutely consider what happened to be back then to have been mobbing, and it happened with backing by the then ED (Neil) and the board (or at least many board members).
I’m just spitballing, but the more I think about it, the more I think that some additional parameters should be put in place if the subject of a CoC complaint for which action is taken by the CoCC is a Foundation member.
It’s one thing if a random community member on GitLab, Discourse, Matrix, etc. is the subject of a complaint and receives sanctions summarily. It’s so easy to just create an online account, and cause problems.
But if the accused person is a Foundation member, that means that they have already gone through a process to demonstrate that they are a non-trivial contributor to the Project, the community or the Foundation. When decisions are made in an opaque manner that affect a Foundation member, people are much more likely to ask questions and voice concerns.
One benefit of an oversight committee would be that they could serve as sort of a semi- appellate body or review board. Perhaps if a Foundation member wanted to seek a review of a decision made by the CoCC, that member could seek a review which would by default be in camera and would not publish the name of the reviewing member.
But at the member’s option and with their consent, the review process could be transparent insofar as the name of the member could be published, as well as: (a) a broad overview of the type of complaint and the action taken by the CoCC (this is already more or less what is published in Transparency Reports), (b) brief reasons for the decision to be requested by the CoCC to be reviewed by the oversight committee, (c) the grounds of review sought by the subject of the complaint, (d) the reason(s) why the subject of the complaint disagrees with the original CoCC decision, and (e) any new information that the subject of the complaint would like to bring to the oversight committee’s attention.
The oversight committee could then decide to uphold the decision of the CoCC, or remit it back to the CoCC for further consideration. Of course, interim, without-prejudice sanctions could remain in place against the subject of the complaint pending review of the decision and the outcome of same.
Of course, the Foundation member who is the subject of such a complaint should be free NOT to have their name published, or to forgo the review process altogether. But at least then, the community at large would know that the Foundation member in question had review options that they chose not to pursue.
Thanks @tbernard. On the changes being discussed, I’m supportive of the work Allan mentioned is already underway, which has been reviewed on the Executive Committee. The open questions include an appeals process, clarifying how bans work between the board and the committee, how the committee handles recusals, and how we find independent third parties to handle reports involving people close to the Foundation, beyond the new members who were added over the past year or two.
On the process, I support a listening phase to hear the community’s concerns properly (as well as the issues we’ve already been tracking), then drawing on professional best-practice expertise to shape an updated draft. Importantly, we can take the redrafted result back to the community to check what people think before e.g. having a vote on the changes. With a new CoC in place, the Foundation should put resources behind training, both for new committee members and for others who can step in during recusals or escalations, which helps independence and continuity.
The hardest part is how to measure or know if it helps rebuild trust: firstly, actually do the revision process, so people can see these things are actually in place and being followed. Secondly, through the consultation itself - do the people who raised concerns see their input reflected before we adopt anything. And eventually, through the transparency reports, showing whether confidence has recovered enough that more people feel able to bring reports at all, which some people are very clear they’re unwilling to do currently. But trust isn’t something we can declare fixed, it’s rebuilt, and the test will be handling the next difficult case and whether the community feels it was handled fairly.
It’s difficult to know what to reform without understanding what actually went wrong. I myself have not involved myself enough to really get into the details of what all happened with Sonny. Since these are foundation level acts, I only have the information that was published and conversations from various folks.
As a director, I would have to look at the evidence and then what the external consultants which I believe were involved in and then look at it. Regardless of the evidence though, clearly the actions taken have broken trust in the CoC with a wide margin of the community and we will have to have a wide eyed conversation about what that entails.
Listening to members, having “office hours” to talk about the CoC are good first steps in being able to listen to community.
Allan and others have mentioned things in flight which I am totally happy to support continuing.
Rob talked about metrics - having surveys and other methods to have ways to measure is another way. For a lot of us, surveys and conversations is how we figure out how happy the community is in the way things are working. It might not seem that surveys are that interesting but as a conference organizer and even an organizational rep, surveys are taken very seriously.
I for one appreciate your recognition of this, Sri.
As someone who has absolutely zero knowledge of what transpired, I do know that many members of the community feel this way.
As the old adage goes, justice must not only be done, but must be seen to be done.
It could very well be that the CoCC acted correctly and in good faith in their application of the CoC. But without sufficient transparency, people are left to fill in the blanks and form their own opinions without an evidentiary foundation for it, which is always going to be problematic in my view.
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