To follow up on @jdorfmanâs idea on integrating into existing documents, I opened an issue on the Contributor Covenant to see if upstream would be interested in reviewing a patch for the Principles of Authentic Participation:
Let me just say. I love the subject and a lot of the things discussed here resonate with my experiences.
I think one of the most important parts of this discussion - especially the âYou and corporationâ thread. I am in a privileged situation that I am co-owner of my organisation and it makes it easier for me to express my own opinions and beliefs without taking too much risk. Also if you are a good professional which is very valuable to your organisation, you can afford sometime to take a stand that will be against of the immediate interest of your organisation. We were pretty lucky in the IT world where we were basically in the âemployee marketâ where good people could find job anywhere and fast so they could take some risks and oppose immediate requests of their organisation if this is against the community.
I can imagine however that it might be a different case now in the COVID-19 situation. There are a lot of lay-offs and the job market even in the IT world might change to âemployerâsâ market. Then the pressure on individuals might be much bigger and people might have a difficult choice - to follow communityâs interest and risk their job - or to fall into what their organisation âexpectsâ them to do.
I thought about it a bit on what we could do about it and I think what might be useful here is some kind of âcode of conductâ by participating organisations. I think itâs easier to take a stand by an individual if they point out to particular rule that the organisation committed to in case they have to take a stand and what is âexpectedâ of them is clearly against the rule. âŠ
For established open source projects, I think this is self-enforced by the project. If you donât follow a projectâs community norms, either your changes will not be accepted or it will take a lot longer for you to accomplish what you actually wanted to do. I think the messaging there is about creating less friction in getting changes introduced into upstream software as a perk of adhering these Principles.
For smaller projects and communities, this could present a risk. If an established corporation shows up in a small project with a lot of money (or developer time), how does the project respond to that interest?
In the last call, @awright suggested the same idea. The summary from that conversation is creating âyet another policy documentâ is likely a high-resistance pathway (but not entirely ruled out). We were more interested in these Principles being adopted into an existing projectâs Code of Conduct or some other pre-existing governance doc. But we didnât go super deep on this in the call (see the notes above for more context).
Agree - especially when in one project you have people with different âbackingâ - this is very much thanks to Apacheâs transparency and peer-pressure. And this is great. For smaller or more âmostly backed by one companyâ projects this might not be the case. I think this is far more important that the âcode of conductâ now when I think about it. Itâs far easier to push back saying âwell - but others wonât agreeâ. I think this should be the most important aspect of a good project, to have different backing sources.
Actually I think what actually helps is a bit of competition between the backers. Some of the most productive cooperation I saw when in the project the backing companies were âfrenemiesâ - so not exactly fully competing and all benefiting from the project improving, but with a bit of potential competition. This makes it pretty much self-sustaining relationship - people help each other when there is mutual/common interest but then keep an eye on each other for any bias/favoritism.
But this is a difficult one to keep I think, and I think what really helps is developing personal relationship between the people in the project - so that they are not only working on the project but becoming friends. What I think works well is doing some work together on a âneutralâ area. For example we are now co-mentoring âoutreachyâ candidates in a project that is beneficial for everyoneâŠ
Itâs great to see that it leads to situation where everyone wins.
Consider following along wit the Governance Readiness working group led by @jlcanovas if this is interesting to you. I think the topics of governance will get at this more deeply than the Principles of Authentic Participation working group will.
Fireside Chat #4 on the Principles of Authentic Participation will be Tuesday, May 5th at 17:00 UTC . Time zone conversions below:
US PDT : 10:00am
US EDT : 1:00pm
London : 6:00pm
IST : 10:30pm
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I will host the chat on BlueJeans. This call may be recorded. I will ask for the consent to record at the beginning of the call. Either way, I will summarize the discussion here.
If you are using BlueJeans for the first time, I suggest testing your audio/video before connecting to the call. There is a browser web app, desktop client, and mobile app:
Your invite went to a Gmail address. Does that sound right?
Iâm glad someone was paying attention I got the day of the week right, but I was off-by-one on the day. It will be Tuesday, May 5th. I edited my last reply in the thread to correct that.
I apologize, I had a last-minute personal conflict today. I am missing the last meeting. Happy to catch up async if there was some discussion. Otherwise I will follow up soon when I have more bandwidth. Thank you for your patience.
Iâd be curious to know what happens next! Now that the fireside chats are done, is there any plan to put the principles in a report that could be shared widely, or something similar?
To compensate for dropping the ball on the last call, I could create an âAdvocate Kitâ on the Principles of Authentic Participation. I would like some sort of affirmation from other current or past participants if this work could be practically useful for you before I embark on this though!
Whatâs inside an Advocate Kit?
Ideally, this Kit includes some simple examples to start with thinking through the Principles, and also helps the reader think about how to explain these ideas to different groups of people (e.g. upper-level management or to project communities).
I will start barebones and simple. But like how we rallied around @DuaneOBrienâs original six proposed principles in the first Fireside Chat, I want a shared resource we can all agree is âGood Enoughâ to encourage sharing this work more widely.
This enables the Principles of Authentic Participation to go forward and for us to shift energies to other Working Group topics. The Principles as they are written now live in GitHub. They can be improved and iterated on later. The site content is licensed freely under CC BY 4.0. If folks want to volunteer to help review future issues or changes to the Principles, we can drive discussion to the git forge.
How to wrap up Spring 2020 Principles Working Group meetings
Otherwise, the primary charge of this Working Group will be finished. It will be upon us, and anyone who reads through this thread in the future, to help carry the flame for this work by taking the Advocate Kit as a resource for starting conversations in your organization (and maybe submitting improvements back upstream occasionally).
But folks (mostly looking at @DuaneOBrien@kpfleming@awright@jdorfman@RichardLitt who have all been excellent co-conspirators), is a first draft âAdvocate Kitâ a potentially practical resource for you to take away from your participation in this Working Group?
(This Working Group will not live forever, but we want you to take away something worthwhile for riding the waves as this Working Group met! )
I think an advocate kit makes sense. Iâm just aware that notes as notes donât travel well, and the goal of disseminating information is to pass it on. A page on the website, like the Sustain Manifesto, would also work well, I think.
Good point. My initial thought was to publish this on the same site as the Principles so it all lives together. But I could also do an online article with an overview of the Principles and leave that as a descriptive resource for others in the future. This could go on my personal blog, the Sustain website, Opensource.com, or a number of other placesâŠ
Not sure if you are serious or joking, but this makes a good point! We could collaborate with the Design & UX Working Group. Or at least ask them for pointers:
I am joining a call for the Design Working Group tomorrow. If there is an open floor discussion, Iâll plug this as a discussion topic.