Community working group: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 20:02, 12 September 2012

Mission

The mission of the Community Working Group is to help to maintain a friendly and welcoming community, thereby ensuring the Fedora Project remains a great project enjoyed by all contributors and users. The primary avenue for achieving this is by helping contributors to communicate better with each other.

Duties

Specific duties of the Community Working Group may include:

Serving as mediators[1]_ to facilitate a discussion between two parties
Defusing tensions in a situation by helping to clarify ideas
Helping to frame debates in terms of problems to be overcome to achieve a goal
Helping to make decisions address as many concerns as possible without sacrificing their core value
Alerting governance bodies that do enforcement of any conflicts that may have escalated beyond the CWG's ability to defuse the situation.

Specific anti-duties of the Community Working Group:

Playing the role of arbitrator (Read this article's introduction to see the difference between mediation and arbitration) in a dispute
Making judgments in a dispute

As a group, the Community Working Group seeks to provide people who are neutral third parties to aid in communication, defusing tense situations, and keeping conversations flowing along productive paths.

Members

Currently, the Community Working Group is being reformulated. Initial members will be listed when selected by the Board. As time progresses, the membership will be more fluid and may no longer be listed directly on this page.

Selection policy

The initial members of the CWG shall be chosen by the Board. After the initial bootstrapping, the Board envisions the CWG allowing others to join by showing up to participate in the group. The Board strongly believes that the CWG will need to establish procedures and precedents for itself so that new members of the group are given responsibilities gradually. The current members of the group should have the power to limit what issues new members are able to take on in an official CWG capacity until they feel the new member has the necessary skills to alleviate tensions and serve the needs of all sides of a dispute. How the CWG chooses to do this is up to the current members.

Contact

cwg mailing list (archived, public)
cwg-private mailing list (unarchived, private) - the public list should be preferred whenever possible
IRC: #fedora-cwg on freenode (also read How to use IRC)
Feel free to contact any member of the group privately (see their user page on how they prefer to be contacted).

Meetings

Meeting schedules and summaries can be found here. Meetings are held in the #fedora-meeting channel on IRC.

Currently, the Community Working Group is not meeting. Once reformulated, regular meetings will recommence.

@@ Line 1: / Line 1: @@
-= Fedora Community Working Group =
+== Mission ==
+The mission of the Community Working Group is to help to maintain a friendly and welcoming community, thereby ensuring the Fedora Project remains a great project enjoyed by all contributors and users.  The primary avenue for achieving this is by helping contributors to communicate better with each other.
+== Duties ==
-== Mission ==
+Specific duties of the Community Working Group may include:
+* Serving as mediators[1]_ to facilitate a discussion between two parties
+* Defusing tensions in a situation by helping to clarify ideas
+* Helping to frame debates in terms of problems to be overcome to achieve a goal
+* Helping to make decisions address as many concerns as possible without sacrificing their core value
+* Alerting governance bodies that do enforcement of any conflicts that may have escalated beyond the CWG's ability to defuse the situation.
+Specific anti-duties of the Community Working Group:
+* Playing the role of arbitrator (Read [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbitration this article's introduction] to see the difference between mediation and arbitration) in a dispute
+* Making judgments in a dispute
-The long-term goal of the Community Working Group is to help to maintain a friendly and welcoming community, thereby ensuring the Fedora Project remains a great project enjoyed by all contributors and users
+As a group, the Community Working Group seeks to provide people who are neutral
+third parties to aid in communication, defusing tense situations, and keeping
+conversations flowing along productive paths.
 == Members ==
-members, appointed by the Board:
+Currently, the Community Working Group is being reformulated.  Initial members will be listed when selected by the Board.  As time progresses, the membership will be more fluid and may no longer be listed directly on this page.
-* [[User:rbergero|Robyn Bergeron]]
+=== Selection policy ===
-* [[User:kevin|Kevin Fenzi]]
-* [[User:mjg59|Matthew Garrett]]
+The initial members of the CWG shall be chosen by the Board.  After the initial
-* <del>[[User:Red|Sandro "red" Mathys]]</del> (will be replaced ~soon)
+bootstrapping, the Board envisions the CWG allowing others to join by showing
-* [[User:Bpepple|Brian Pepple]]
+up to participate in the group.  The Board strongly believes that the CWG will
+need to establish procedures and precedents for itself so that new members of
+the group are given responsibilities gradually.  The current members of the
+group should have the power to limit what issues new members are able to take
+on in an official CWG capacity until they feel the new member has the necessary
+skills to alleviate tensions and serve the needs of all sides of a dispute.
+How the CWG chooses to do this is up to the current members.
 == Contact ==
@@ Line 26: / Line 49: @@
 Meeting schedules and summaries [[:Category:CWG_meetings|can be found here]]. Meetings are held in the [[Fedora_meeting_channel|#fedora-meeting]] channel on [[Communicate#IRC|IRC]].
-== Charter ==
+Currently, the Community Working Group is not meeting.  Once reformulated, regular meetings will recommence.
-=== Introduction ===
-As a large, diverse community the Fedora Project benefits from having both a trustworthy central point of contact for questions about communication between participants as well as a respected independent mediator between contributors and users of the Fedora Project.
-The Community Working Group aims to act as a central point of contact by being available to communicate needs between various groups within project, including group leaders, contributors, and users.
-The group also acts as mediator upon request in the rare cases where the communication breaks down.
-This group is chartered by and accountable to the Fedora Project Board.
-=== Goal and Strategy ===
-The long-term goal of the Community Working Group is to help to maintain a friendly and welcoming community, thereby ensuring the Fedora Project remains a great project enjoyed by all contributors and users.
-A participative approach is employed, which presents the Community Working Group as supporting staff who help where help is needed.
-The group is prepared to help out community members whenever they request support, for example in cases where a member becomes targeted by a group of malicious individuals or when a member has problems expressing opinions or ideas because of a language difficulty.
-Additionally we will actively approach people where we feel it is necessary, although this is expected to be in exceptional cases only.
-=== Tasks for the Working Group ===
-Short term tasks may include:
-* Create clear and easy points of contact, including a mailing list, irc channels.
-* Assisting to write a Fedora Code of Conduct (or recommending that one is not needed).
-* Determine how best to work together and coordinate efforts with other groups within fedora dealing with similar concepts and goals, including FAMSCo, FESCo, irc-support-sig, Hall Monitors, mailing list moderators, Websites-sig (planet).
-* Decide how to deal with different types and degree of conflict
-=== Staffing ===
-The inner-circle of the Community Working Group is the mailing list where most issues are being discussed. Mail from outside the CWG staff is moderated, but all legitimate mail will be accepted (i.e. spam will be dropped, all mail related to the activities of the CWG will be accepted). On occasions individuals may be invited to join the mailing list in order that particular aspects of the CWG's work may be discussed.
-There are occasions when a place for private conversation about public matters is helpful and even necessary, particularly when the matter has reached the state where de-escalation is required. Having a safe and private area to handle such matters not only makes it easier to establish calm and reason, but often provides the sort of confidentiality that is needed when discussing sensitive or even embarrassing issues.
-<mailing list reference> is a private mailing list, therefore issues discussed on the list must not be disclosed without permission from the CWG and those involved in any particular issue.
-We ask people who wish to stay anonymous to approach a trusted member of the Community Working Group, who will then bring the issue forward to the rest of the Group.
-The Community Working Group is made up of people who have track records of working on these sorts of issues and who have proven to have qualities relevant for community work.
-This charter will stand until one year after ratification (Oct 25, 2010), at which point it will be revisited and an updated charter submitted for renewal and continuation of the Community Working Group.
-== References ==
-* A major portion of this draft was shamelessly borrowed from the [http://ev.kde.org/workinggroups/cwg.php KDE Community Working Group charter]
 [[Category:CWG]]

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