Community Team FAQ
Here's some description of what the team does, and what people should expect if we're talking to them.
Contents
What we are not
People may confuse us with simiarly-named teams in other communities, especially "CoC teams". While one of our roles is to act as interpreters for the CoC, we don't issue formal rulings and our evaluation does not have the effect of adversely affecting someone's standing within Debian. CT's opinions are purely advisory. (Not to be confused with "having no effect")
Specifically:
- We don't ban people from lists, although we may reach out to listmaster in egregious cases
- We're not "politics police" / thought police. We're just trying to keep people being civil to each other in our corner of the 'Net the best way we can. We're not robots, we're not infallible - we're human volunteers, like everyone else in Debian.
- We don't demote Developers or Maintainers. Such actions are made subject to the discretion of DAM, although they value our input, and in egregious/intransigent cases we may make a referral to DAM ourselves
For those of us who are delegates in other teams, we keep our CT work and other work separate. For example, we have a CT member who is also an ftpmaster. Your requests and NEW processing time will not be affected due to your interaction with the CT.
See also #Next steps
Who contacts us, and why?
The Community Team may be contacted by anyone.
Many of the messages sent to us are simple to deal with and not of interest to the wider project, e.g.:
- spam
- "how can I contribute to Debian?"
- "please remove my data from the list archives"
Often someone will reach out to us, noting an email chain, an IRC interaction or perhaps a bug report and saying "Do you think this sort of thing is OK?" or "I object to ABC's treatment of me in this email". Our normal response will be to investigate - we can give an independent, dispassionate view on the communication in question and reply appropriately.
Somebody else might say "Various folk seem to have been having difficult interactions with MN - do you think you could reach out to them and find out their side of the story?" or "PQR is sounding really stressed - could you reach out and see if they're OK?" One of the team may look at what's been happening and reach out accordingly.
Occasionally, one of the CT members might reach out independently to someone on a mailing list or similar and write something like "XZ language or conduct is inappropriate on this list" or maybe "You are not creating the impression you want / getting your point across and this is not helpful. Please consider doing X or Y instead?"
Not every complaint merits an immediate response; not every disagreement needs CT help. In cases where we do decide to contribute, we will often wait to establish whether something is a one-off issue or a sustained behaviour. CT assumes good faith and recognises that we all have bad days or make mistakes. Fundamentally, we're also human and we don't have fixed rules here - a lot of what we do is down to experience and human judgement in each case.
The messages we send
Most messages we send advising about behaviour are literally just that: friendly advice to help people. Our aim is to help Debian be a welcoming place and most people understand and accept that. We try to be neutral in our communications like this - we're trying to encourage a positive atmosphere rather than just punish bad actions.
We may send a stronger message where we think this is necessary. If we believe you are violating the CoC in a message, we will say so explicitly.
How we write messages
We'll often send messages as individuals without necessarily even mentioning the CT - we're project members with opinions of our own, of course.
Team members will often collaborate on more important / more involved messages. This is at the discretion of the team members if they are unsure on how to handle an issue, or if they otherwise think the matter would benefit from multiple sign-offs. It can also be appropriate to lean on one or other person's particular expertise and experience.
Next steps
In egregious cases, the Community Team may flag messages to listmaster, owner@bugs.d.o, or other appropriate system owners for consideration there. We might suggest a ban if behaviour is particularly bad, but we mostly try to leave decisions on such actions to the system owners' discretion. They will generally communicate any adverse action in writing to the affected person. Appeals concerning such actions should be directed to the system owner.
If there is a consistent pattern of behaviour that we believe violates the Code of Conduct, we may write to system owners and/or DAM with more details of what we see is happening. Again, it is up to those other teams to make decisions on what further actions might be appropriate. We will advise on the CoC at this point, as necessary. It is very rare that we ever get to this stage. We would normally have contacted the people in question multiple times previously to suggest improved behaviour before we got here, so this escalation should not be a complete surprise.
Further questions?
Mail us: community@debian.org
We don't bite! 