freebsd announce - Jan 2016 - Initial FreeBSD Core Team comments on concerns about harassment in the FreeBSD community

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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