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Online Community Working Group #23

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# Online Community Working Group
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## Scope of responsibilities

This group exists to support the official community platforms and those in elevated roles on those platforms.

The [Django Forum](https://forum.djangoproject.com/) and the [Django Discord](https://discord.gg/xcRH6mN4fa) are core parts of the overall community and those that help and moderate these platforms take significant time from their day to help others.
We can support them through training and taking action to make their lives easier.

The broad goals of the group are:
- facilitate and centralise discussion between moderators and admins on the various platforms
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I wonder how much input you can get from people (e.g. me) that are admins on the Discord while they're not in the group themselves. But I imagine everyone is happy to share, and ideally some group members would have reasonable access levels to at least the mod only sections for example.

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I don't think we need all admins/moderators to be part of the working group 👍

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Agreed that not all admins/moderators need to be a part of the group, but I would prefer representation and input from those groups.

- coordinate efforts for training and processes around moderation
- provide support to improve the platforms to lighten moderation and admin workloads
- provide training and support to the wider community on how to use the platforms effectively
- ensure consistency that our online Django communities are welcoming and safe spaces

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- What actions are you proposing the WG be allowed to take directly?
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- Creation and management of processes related to community platforms.
- Adding/removing moderators & other roles
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I'm a bit wary of delegating this. I think what we have done with the Discord has worked well so far and I'm not sure people would be happy with having mods "imposed" on them.

I'm not so sure about the forum. One issue is that I think only Andrew has full access, right?

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That's fair, I could have worded this better, but initial idea was to simply formalize what we already do with a tiny bit more regularity. ie having the WG prompt the mod teams to review any new moderators, ask if anyone wants to step down at regular periods (eg 6 months)

Definitely not going to be imposing anyone on any community

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In this section, the delegation we want to focus on is what the board would normally ought to do, that this group could do instead. So perhaps this can be worded as:

Suggested change
- Adding/removing moderators & other roles
- Proposals to add/remove moderators & other roles

Or possibly taken to another section altogether. The other two points below aren’t really current board remits either.

- Training for moderators
- Ensuring moderation is consistent across teams and platforms
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I don't think this can be ensured, but we should still strive.

One issue I think is that Discord skews quite gen Z and especially quite "online" people. I think we tolerate (and probably should, with some guidance for them) things there that probably wouldn't in other places. Personally I find this to be a strength but it has been one of the constant problems. There is a constant tension between people wanting me to ban people and when I do ban people, people telling me I'm doing a bad job for banning them. Which is weird because I only ever banned one person for a CoC violation in the first place. You can probably tell this is a bit of a sore spot so I do think something should be done here.

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I think this starts with producing actionable guidance and some transparency on how we go about about moderation. This guidance does need to take into account the nuances of each platform and what is natural about each of them.

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I think I mostly agree that sensitivity to context is important, and that there are behaviors that would be fine in one place and not in another. Like, a common communication pattern in real-time chat platforms is to

make a longer point
spread out over several messages
one at a time
kinda thinking it through as you go
making a lot of short posts.

That's, like, completely fine in Discord or Slack or whatever, but if someone were to do that on the forum, consistently, or here in Github, we'd probably find it pretty annoying and at some point someone probablly should ask them to conform a bit more to the norms of the platform.

But on the other hand, thiis needs to have some limits. Context does mater, but only to a point. There are certainly corners of the Discord community where, for example, homophobic slurs are common. That's pretty clearly not OK in official Django spaces.

I was super happy to see this proposal because it seems to be like this group could be a place where these lines can get hashed out. Starting with some core agreed-upon principles that then can be massaged for different contexts seems super cool to me.

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Yes, completely agreed (although typing
like this
also annoys me on
Discord and Slack
) :)

- Taking ideas from the community to improve the community spaces.
- Which actions will the WG take back to the Board for votes?
- Moving platforms if required
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- Budget to improve existing platforms

There is a lot of potential ideas in this space. Part of the WG will be setting up a process to take ideas and have a backlog of these ideas.

### Delegated responsibilities

With regards to Django Software Foundation responsibilities and resources, the group operates with:

- Admin privileges to members of the forum & Discord or existing admin representive joining as a member.
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I don't see much delegated powers, either; this group seems more of a place for a community of practice than a group that needs to act on behalf of the board.

I s'pose at some point we could transition the budget for paying for Discourse to the group directly (and in theory Discord though I don't think we pay for anything there right?) -- that seems fine to me, but also it's such a minor thing it doesn't really matter where it lays imo.

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For Discord, I pay around ~$6 monthly to run a bot on Digital Ocean. It's arguable whether it's worth having or not as we have another (free) bot that does more stuff. But I would like to use it for more things, just, well, time :) - I'm happy to keep paying for it myself anyway.

One other thing we could consider is paying for boosts. These are like a yearly subscription more or less. If you buy nitro (kind of premium status) for your account you can boost a server. And then you can buy extra boosts. At the moment there are 12 people boosting the server, including me. This has varied and mostly increased over time. To keep the server at level 3, which has some benefits, we'd need 14. So there is perhaps a case to pay for some boosts. The most interesting thing we really gain from this is having a custom invite link, which I think would look something like https://discord.gg/django - which is a bit easier on the eyes than the current invite links we use (e.g. on the website). It's quite expensive at around (for me) €35 per year per boost. Worth it? Probably not, but good to keep in mind.

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Arguably it's moral to pay for the utilities we use if we have the ability to.

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I think it’d be good to be clear whether this is intended for all members to have those privileges, or only some. It’ll be trickier to get people involved with this group if there has to be enough vetting to make sure people are trustworthy admins. So personally I’d recommend moving this as a "nice-to-have" for group members.


## Initial membership

- Chair: TBD
- Co-Chair: TBD
- Board Liaison (must be an active Board member; may be the same as Chair/Co-Chair): TBD
- Other members:
- Andrew Miller
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We have struggled a lot with other groups in selecting a Chair and Co-Chair, so just a heads’up this might go quite a bit faster if you just volunteer yourself for it. We’d be lucky to have you!

Re Board Liaison – we’ll have four new board members starting soon, who might be interested in this.

Re other members – please let folks know once you think you’re ready to start adding? We’ve sent a few people towards this proposal as part of the DSF board elections.

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I've been a bit busy of late, but now that I have caught up to a bunch of stuff...

Re Board Liaison – we’ll have four new board members starting soon, who might be interested in this.

I'm going to quote @knyghty who is hopefully still interested here:

I'm not sure I will have enough time to dedicate to joining the group, but on the off chance I end up on the board I'd be happy to be the board liaison for my term.

Tom, I hope you are still interested :)

Re other members – please let folks know once you think you’re ready to start adding? We’ve sent a few people towards this proposal as part of the DSF board elections.

As a fellow Discord moderator and DSF member, I would be more than happy to join this WG, if you'll have me.

We have struggled a lot with other groups in selecting a Chair and Co-Chair

+1 to Andy as chair. If possible, a co-chair from another community would probably be good (currently, I guess that means the forums; I am curious whether Reddit should also be involved).

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In terms of Reddit, that is definitely a possibility, however I would want to have a conversation with the Social Media WG as per this post as to whether Reddit is a social media site or a community platform. Essentially I would like to see a clear ownership of different online spaces so that communication doesn't get confused both internally and externally.


## Future membership

Answer the following questions here:

- Who is eligible to join? Any volunteer, or are there specific requirements?
- Anyone can join, but they at least need to be known within the community.
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- How do people who want to join sign up / volunteer / express interest?
- Send one of the WG members a message on Discord or the Forum
- How will decisions on adding/removing members be handled?
- Direct membership: new members may self-nominate; members will serve for a year minimum with the option to step out after each year. New members will get approved by existing members of the WG.
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## Budget

- How much money or spending discretion do you need?
- None to begin with, however I would expect over time budget to get allocated for supporting the Forum and Discord server. See below for [ideas](#budget-ideas)
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- How do you want that money allocated:
- None to begin with.

## Comms

Where will discussions and activities take place?

Suggestions:

- Private Channel in the Discord Server and private category in the forum, possibly also a channel is the DSF slack.
- This space should be shared with the CoC Commitee or another space for shared comms across platforms.
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Meetings: Quarterly video call meeting on Discord.

## Reporting

How and how often will the WG report back to the board?
- Quarterly forum post and discord announcement of improvements made to the platforms.
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### Budget ideas

- Training for Moderators & Admins
- Hosting fees for bots
- Subscription fees for bots
- Tools for community management/growth (https://orbit.love)
- Hosting for the forum
- Discord Nitro