[FFmpeg-devel] [RFC] VDD FFmpeg session and community survey

[Thilo Borgmann]

Hi all,

I'm very sorry that it took me so long to send this to the list, finally.
Since this is an everlasting topic for years, I wanted to deal
thoroughly with it to have a chance to actually influence the situation.

Like in many previous years/sessions about FFmpeg development, the topic of
hostility at the ML and IRC channel was discussed yet another time. There
have been several voices at this year's session that are still unhappy
with the current hostility in the FFmpeg community. So this point has been
discussed in the audience for a while. However, there has also been a voice
claiming that the current situation and regulation by our CoC is ok and working.

According to my experience, these discussions lead to two ends. First,
is considering the FFmpeg community to be a hostile environment shared by a
majority of the community so that any further thoughts to try to change this are
valid or not? Second, assuming it is a majority that dislikes current hostility,
what to do about it to improve the situation?

Long ago, JB made a proposal to overcome this by getting a community committee
to act upon hostile behavior in our environment and sanction the respective
authors. This proposal has been brought up again regarding the question of how
to proceed and like in the previous years, this proposal raised no rejections
from anybody present (this and in the previous years).

In the end, the outcome of this VDDs FFmpeg session has been that I bring this
proposal to the mailing list, finally. Therefore, I took the time to talk to
several people not only about the proposal itself but also about the experience
of other communities having such a committee driven mechanism of dealing with
CoC conflicts. From that the idea emerged to get an overview of the actual community
opinion of things is to conduct a simple survey about this question. So this is
exactly what I'd like to do next to giving the mere proposal.

The proposal of a community committee summarized:

- A committee is to be created consisting of community members that are voted
into it
- This committee can (upon request) sanction violations of our CoC by its given
powers
- The committee is object to reelection every year

A more detailed possible implementation of the proposal is attached as a patch to
our developers documentation. The survey is done to get an idea of what the community
thinks about that matter and its proposed solution.

The survey shall be conducted for everyone to participate freely, so a simple
thread on the mailing list would hardly be suitable and will most likely end in
endless discussions. To help with that, we've set up a survey that can be done completely
anonymously by sending out private tokens to all possible participants. Even the survey
admins cannot map given survey answers to a person/token.

Please note that this survey is _not_ meant to be a vote about the proposal. It is to
determine if we should actually have a refinement/vote on instantiating such a
community committee - depending on the community's point of view.

I will start this survey and sending out tokens directly to every subscriber of
the ffmpeg-devel mailing list on this Friday, Nov 23rd. If you don't want to
participate in the survey, you can send me a private mail before that data to
exclude your mail address from the participants lists. Afterwards you can click
the link in the mails to opt out of the survey yourself. The survey will end on
Mondday, Dez 3nd (a little more than a week). Afterwards, I will post the results
of the survey here in this thread. 

I'd really appreciate participation in the survey from everyone. I'd like to ask to file
just one survey for every mail address you might have registered here - you can opt-out
or just ignore additional mails. I'm sorry for spam for everyone not reading this thread.
Many thanks to the KDE community and Lydia in particular for discussion and supporting us
with the survey infrastructure.

Thanks,
Thilo
-------------- next part --------------
From 777631a9181ccb549170409b7cf9c5934ab6aeb8 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Thilo Borgmann <thilo.borgmann at mail.de>
Date: Thu, 22 Nov 2018 19:49:18 +0100
Subject: [PATCH] doc/developers: Add Community Committee

---
 doc/developer.texi | 64 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
 1 file changed, 64 insertions(+)

diff --git a/doc/developer.texi b/doc/developer.texi
index 5c342c9106..5c4014b7de 100644
--- a/doc/developer.texi
+++ b/doc/developer.texi
@@ -451,6 +451,70 @@ instead and point them in the right direction.
 Finally, keep in mind the immortal words of Bill and Ted,
 "Be excellent to each other."
 
+ at chapter Community Committee
+
+The objective of the community committee is to sustain an environment as described
+by the code of conduct. It is to protect the dignity of each member of the community
+and to stop personal harassment of any kind. It is not to interfere with any other
+aspects of the development process.
+
+Further on it is to impose any sanctions related to violations of the code of
+conduct only if these incidents are brought up to its attention from directly
+involved parties of such an incident.
+
+With respect to these conditions, the committee is entitled to:
+
+ at itemize
+ at item
+    Address violations publically
+ at item
+    Conduct a private hearing of involved parties
+ at item
+    Temporarily or permanently ban individuals from the mailing lists and IRC channels
+ at item
+    Temporarily or permanently cease commit rights for any project repository
+ at end itemize
+
+It is up to the committee to decide in a case-to-case manner about which sanctions
+are suitable to apply in conformance with its entitlement given above.
+
+The committee will publically announce each and every decision upon incidents brought
+to its attention including sanctioning, if any, within one week after an incidents has
+been brought up to its attention.
+
+ at subheading Committee members
+
+The community committee consists of three elected individuals. Committee members are
+elected for a period of one year and are automatically removed from the committee after
+that period. Reelection of committee members for the following period is possible.
+
+If for any reason a current member of the committee wishes to leave the committee, the
+whole committee is to be reelected. No former committee members having left the committee
+on their own wish can be a candidate for the successor committee.
+
+ at subheading Committee election
+
+The election of all committee members is conducted by the community.
+All community members that meet at least one of the following requirements are eligible to vote:
+
+ at itemize
+ at item
+    Having commit rights for any project repository
+ at item
+    Being a maintainer as listed in @file{MAINTAINERS}
+ at item
+    Being among the 100 most active contributors during the past year, determined by:
+    @code{<some git command to be specified, TBD> | head -100}
+ at end itemize
+
+A Condorcet method @uref{http://somewhere.org/something, TBD} will be used to perform
+an election of the committee members.
+
+The vote has to implement a direct, free, equal and secret election.
+The results are to be publicly available.
+The election should be completed not later than the end of the ongoing period.
+Any community member can call on itself or any other person to be a candidate for an election.
+
 @anchor{Submitting patches}
 @chapter Submitting patches
 
-- 
2.17.2 (Apple Git-113)