How will you ensure the safety, inclusion, and voice of minorities in the Nix Community?

[nyabinary]

Question

What specific measures will you advocate for and implement to ensure the safety and inclusion of minorities in the Nix community, and how will you ensure that their voices are actively heard and considered in the decision-making process?

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[Gabriella439]

One of my heuristics for helping communities feel more welcoming and inclusive is to avoid a few voices from dominating the discussion (regardless of their beliefs, background, or orientation).

A common anti-pattern in these discussions is that you'll have a few recurring individuals who are already very outspoken that feel entitled to an even larger voice in the community than they already have. To be clear, it's actually very normal and okay for people to seek greater influence in their communities, but the failure mode is when these people don't receive the attention or influence they feel they deserve and then they don't take no for an answer. Then what happens is you'll see these people try to artificially increase their influence by creating controversy or trying to force their way into community spaces that try to exclude them.

These sorts of people create an unwelcoming environment for everyone else (not just minorities), but vulnerable minorities are typically the first to leave because they have a much lower tolerance for this sort of behavior.

I also believe that the "punishment should fit the crime". If a person engages in this sort of behavior a typical appropriate punishment is a temporary suspension from community spaces so that they can cool off, reflect upon what they've done, and give other people a chance to participate more. This also offers a path for these people to improve their behavior and rejoin the community on better terms. However, if they are repeat offenders and/or others begin to leave because of their behavior then I think a ban should be on the table.

[mschwaig]

Somebody posted an essay on Zulip, which I really like, about The Tyranny of Structurelessness.

Having a community without a power structure is impossible, because if here is no official one then there will be an unofficial one based on social capital. The problem with an unofficial power structure is that those in power can easily evade responsibility, by denying that they have any power.

The SC should put people in charge of things, including both power and responsibility.
That way if there is an issue, someone is in charge of handling it, or it can be escalated up, and there can be consequences, including for the SC.

To me this is the most important and impactful thing we can do for those without power, including minorities.

[tomberek]

I have advocated for such measures. These are also enumerated as responsibilities of the Steering Committee:

• "Maintain effective escalation points..." I've have served as a mediator between people who have felt wronged and have also proactively reached out to people in efforts to de-escalate situations. It is not always easy for someone to advocate for themselves effectively, so it can be helpful to have someone do so on their behalf. In the opposite situation; it is more effective to be corrected by someone you respect and trust than by someone you are in an active disagreement with.
• "Delegate authority to long-term teams and committees, allowing them to evolve policies as needed." I wrote RFC 102 with the goal of establishing a team to perform the necessary moderation tasks and it specifically included clauses ensuring a welcoming and safe environment for all. Since then, the team has evolved and the CoC adopted. These measures need to be made more effective and I would look to other open-source communities to ensure we learn from their best practices.
• "Create and enforce appropriate rules for Nix project spaces..." The most harmful effects in a community are not due to bad decisions, but instead due to manipulation by bad actors, regardless of the intentions. Ensuring the rules are clear and consistently enforced is an oversight responsibility of the SC.

A specific example of voices that have not had as much access as they should is that of regular Nixpkgs contributors. I believe this is part of what leads to disenfranchisement and thus I have been thinking about how to ensure the existing informal teams have a voice during decision-making.

[getchoo]

I believe a great first step here would be in growing our moderation team. Currently we are at 6 members -- which given the pretty rapid growth of our community (for reference, 2023's community survey reported that 38% of respondents had only been using Nix for less than a year, and I would only imagine this number will grow with the number of respondents increasing by more than 30% this year) -- may not be suitable even in the near future. Putting more resources into this team would allow for faster responses and more attention towards those that are most vulnerable in our community, onboarding new moderators in the long term by better documenting the decision making process and giving some time to mentor them, and continuing the work in https://github.com/nixos/moderation to increase transparency with the entire community. To go a step further, I also want to see these new moderators elected by the community (similar to the SC) to ensure they accurately reflect the composition of our userbase

Another important part is in how we delegate responsibilities. As mentioned by tomberek above, this is already one of our jobs in the SC, and I believe it is the most important. By compartmentalizing decision making abilities over parts of our project into the hands of smaller teams, we can ensure that no one group has an overwhelming and overpowering voice, while also giving the chance for minority groups to still have a say and grow in both their individual teams and the project at large

Lastly, I would like to take some inspiration from other projects in both celebrating, spreading awareness of and directly supporting our community's diversity. Fedora for example has implemented programs that help bring together minorities inside of their own community, ensure they have the resources to do so, and showcase that diversity to the wider FOSS community. I believe this plays a key part in avoiding the "boy's locker room" phenomenon that is all too common in technology circles today, and has been shown time and time again to be a major uphill battle for women, people of color, and queer people in getting involved in these kinds of spaces

[phaer]

tl;dr: clearer structures, escalation points & active moderation. Creating a more welcoming culture for more voices to be heard.

I agree with pretty much everything written in the posts above me and it makes me cautiously optimistic that we can get better at this to read those well-written responses :)

What specific measures will you advocate for and implement to ensure the safety and inclusion of minorities in the Nix community, and how will you ensure that their voices are actively heard and considered in the decision-making process?

I believe clearer structures, responsibilities and escalation points to be a good first step, even if they might turn out to be insufficient on their own, to make the community more welcoming to people from all kinds of backgrounds.

Active moderation and keeping the moderation team well-equipped to handle a growing community is critical as well in my opinion.

For specific measures, I'd like to consult the existing moderation team first. But both, expansions and more explicit processes seem sensible to me personally. Time zones could be one consideration, as most of the current team seems to be in Europe. I am sympathetic to the idea of voting for moderators, but I think that it should not be the first step, as good elections take quite a bit of preparation effort and one would enough candidates for the position of "unpaid internet janitor" in the first place.

Some smaller ideas:

• Promote existing initiatives such as #gm:nixos.org) more prominently if wanted by channel admins. The same would be true for other minority-focused initiatives and sub-communities as well if moderation and community standards could be enforced.
• Consider speakers queues for synchronous meetings/calls to make more voices heard. move people who just spoke to the back of the queue in order to avoid dialogs and give everyone in the meeting the same change to contribute.
• Evaluate use of video/audio calls. I see much value in quick, synchronous communications, but at the same time I am afraid the might not be very inclusive for many different people, i.e.:
  • They need an agreed-upon global time. Making it harder to participate for users in some parts of the world.
  • You need to speak English and understand it if spoken quickly; not be too insecure about your accent.
  • You might have a disability or speech impediment
  • Your voice might not be perceived to match your gender expression which might be a concern to you.

[nyabinary]

To ensure the safety and inclusion of minorities in the Nix community, I would advocate for consistent enforcement and regular transparency reports on moderation actions. I believe this transparency is essential for building trust and accountability.

In decision-making, I will push for mechanisms like community surveys, anonymous feedback channels, and representation on teams. I would also encourage regular community-wide check-ins to ensure that minority voices are not only heard but meaningfully integrated into our governance, contributing to a more inclusive and balanced decision-making process.

[proofconstruction]

This is a super important issue to me, especially since poor handling of these issues was directly responsible for a lot of challenges we've recently faced, including especially some high-profile departures and the general community fracture over the NixCon 2023 sponsorship debacle.

First, since we cannot assume that the demographics of the general world population are reflected proportionally in the Nix community, I would begin by consulting data sources like the community survey and self-reports to understand which classes actually constitute minorities in the Nix community. Two examples of why this matters:

• while trans people constitute a small minority in the general population of the United States, they're comparatively rather well represented in the US software industry, particularly in functional programming communities.
• China has the largest national population on Earth, and there is an important and quickly-growing Nix community there, but due to the language barrier and the domestic internet being largely self-contained, our English-speaking community contains very few mainland Chinese Nix users.

I consider it crucial to establish an environment that is welcoming to as many people as possible, both because it's generally unwise to exclude people without good reason and because diverse inclusivity is just part of being a good neighbor in our rapidly-changing world. I want to revisit the historical community survey data to understand how our community's demographics have shifted over time, particularly correlating this with other data from Discourse and Matrix, and in consideration of the effects of past events. Part of this work will involve reaching out to people who have left our community, to understand the factors that went into that decision, and to learn whether there's a path to their return. By synthesizing all of this information, we'll be able to chart a better path in the future.

On the Committee, I intend to host regular informal open calls where community members can join to ask questions, make suggestions, or just meet to chat. I also plan to hold "office hours" where I'll set aside time to sync up individually with anyone who doesn't feel empowered to speak out during the open calls. I expect that having more casual settings like this will help us all get to know each other a bit better, and help us find more common ground on which to walk forward, together.

I hope this election results in a Steering Committee whose membership is multiply-diverse. Figuring out how to work together in the context of the Committee will help inform how the broader community can collaborate more effectively.

To anyone reading: whether or not I'm elected, know that you're always welcome to drop me a message.

[jtojnar]

Ensuring the moderation team is adequately staffed and supported is essential. We should help the moderator team with recruiting new members. I agree with @getchoo that having moderators elected might be useful (despite StackOverflow's other issues, its community moderation worked pretty well IMO) but I am not sure we are yet at the scale where it is needed. Part of us delegating the authority might be trusting the moderators to self-select suitable candidates.

I would also be open to hear from people whose voice is getting lost.

[Infinidoge]

A well staffed moderation team is the core of making sure people of all stripes feel safe, and as nyabinary mentioned, having transparency reports as part of this is critical. Creating channels through which the community as a whole can give feedback (such as surveys), and ways individual people can raise concerns (anonymous reporting being a key component I've seen work for the biggest community I moderate for), are also necessary for a safe and functioning system.

Ensuring the inclusion and voice of minorities is less straight forward, and at the moment I don't have a very comprehensive thought process on how it should be implemented. mschwaig's mention of The Tyranny of Structurelessness (link as posted by Jo Freeman) is well-placed, though, and well worth a read for those who haven't read it yet.