Fireside Chat #3 on the Principles of Authentic Participation will be Tuesday, April 7th at 17:00 UTC. Time zone conversions below:
US PDT: 10:00am
US EDT: 1:00pm
London: 6:00pm
IST: 10:30pm
Hosted on BlueJeans
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:
âGetting organizations on-board: How can we best include open source organizations in adopting these Principles? How do we get our own companies/organizations to follow these Principles?â
Iâll work on a more detailed agenda over the next week.
Attendees knew the calls were being recorded but I would like to be explicit for folks who were on the first call that they are comfortable with wider publishing. Iâll ask for this consent at the beginning of Fireside Chat #3.
A friendly reminder that our call is tomorrow at 17:00 UTC. Time zone conversions are in the previous reply.
Here is a tentative agenda for us to stick to:
[5m] Welcome / helloâs
[10-20m] What is your use case for these Principles?
Itâs okay, be selfish for a moment. Why do you want these Principles? How will you personally use them? Do you want to introduce them at your workplace? Do you want to suggest them in an open source project?
Letâs take some time to understand the different motivations that brought people here.
[10-20m] Who Gives and who Receives authentic participation?
Letâs spend time to define the audience of the Principles. Who are these Principles for? Are they for corporate organizations that participate in open source? Are they for project communities?
The âclosing criteriaâ for this conversation is that everyone should be able to comfortably describe who Gives and Receives authentic participation in open source.
[remainder] How can we participate now or later?
Group brainstorming to define participation in sharing and advocating these Principles. From the people in the call, how can we all pitch in just a little bit to push this work forward? When these calls are done, what will participation look like?
I donât expect this topic to have definitive conclusions, but this will be the primary focus of the fourth and final Fireside Chat. Think of this as a short framing exercise for the full conversation next time.
As always, Iâm open to feedback on the agenda. Looking forward to our chat tomorrow.
My meeting notes are summarized below. They are patchy in places because I was balancing between facilitation and note-taking. Note to self, recruit help with note-taking for the final call.
Power dynamics: Help people who run projects understand power especially when money is introduced
Framework for giving those who steward and leave projects to remind maintainers how others can contribute to project
âShare languageâ
Shifting from reactive to proactive response by anticipating power dynamics and having principles in place when we respond, instead of reacting to the tough stuff
Be here to learn more (@jwf aside: Which, B.T.W., is perfectly valid )
Who Gives and who Receives authentic participation?
Do we want to separate âGiversâ and âReceiversâ?
Authentic participation is about reciprocity
Co-equality in a shared understanding of participation
Potential difference in power dynamic
Forces someone to identify as Giver or Receiver; but why not spectrum instead of fixed dichotomy?
Kinda giving / kinda receiving: What happens to those people?
Who is a Receiver?
Project community as a whole; not an individual in community
âEveryone who caresâ about project or involvement in project
A Receiver is never an entity. Is it a Community instead?
How do the Principles relate to companies/corporations that lack an internal perspective on open source?
Showing up and not being a good steward of participation in a project
Example: Suddenly pulling engineers off of a project because no longer a priority for corporation (ouch!)
How do we solve for that behavior?
@awright: What about Codes of Conduct? Instead of harassment, about defining participation
@kpfleming: Positive affirmations (âdo thisâ) instead of negative prescriptions (âdonât do thisâ)
@awright: Principles as part of a projectâs documentation?
Awareness on project-side seems appealing
E.g. not funding/participating in projects without a CoC; visible badge of engagement for a project?
@DuaneOBrien: Codes of Conduct about individual contributors to projects
Governing individual behavior is a CoC
Creating a Code for the Principles is âanother thingâ that muddies waters for different types of codes of conduct when they want to get involved with a project
@gunner: Hypothesis of need: Understand project challenges and build understanding before putting this out there for general consumption
Making sure we address needs that are actually there
@DuaneOBrien: Pulling out org principles, like âEnforces behaviorâ and âPuts community firstâ
Getting outside feedback on Principles
Questions to posit:
âWould these help you or not?â
âDo you have a problem this solves?â
âWhich principle would have helped you?â
Need better way to collect high-value feedback to get to a point of less abstraction
@kpfleming: Not unreasonable for a CoC to include a bullet about authentic principles?
@jdorfman: âGetting people to adopt another file (or modifying an existing CoC) is difficultâ
Connections Apache Software Foundation: Reach out to network there and politely ask to distribute Principles to PMCs of different projects
Goal to understand if PMCs have experienced in their personal role and Apache projects, would these Principles have been useful for organizations contributing to your projects?
Anecdotal: OpenOffice and Oracle
@gunner: Throw a collaborative doc out and get a call together for people to hack together (probably after Fireside Chat #4?)
Consolidate experiences and examples from my personal work doing consulting for humanitarian orgs and participating in open source programs at universities
Reach out for early feedback to folks in open source projects I participate in like the Fedora Project
Where do we go from here?
We are slowly but surely picking up momentum as we arrive to the expiration date of this Discourse thread. As a reminder, I am planning to host one final Fireside Chat on these Principles. The focus for that last chat is below:
We will likely not use our shared time to brainstorm examples, but we will definitely focus on the question of âwhere do we go from here?â Defining participation for this Working Group after the Fireside Chats is key to the future life of this work.
Iâm taking time to process these notes, write up a final agenda, and then I will put out another WhenIsGood poll for our next meeting. Fireside Chat #4 will be happen somewhere between 27 April to 8 May. Stay tuned!
Thanks everyone who made time in their busy schedules to take part. Iâm excited for where we go next.
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
Hosted on BlueJeans
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! )
Nice to hear from you.
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.
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