Dear FreeBSD Community:

There has been significant communication over the last two days relating to 
Randi Harper’s recent blog post, which demands an urgent response. First, and 
to be clear: there will be no tolerance for harassment or abusive behavior 
within the FreeBSD Project or its broader community. We encourage any community 
members aware of problems in this regard to contact us immediately.

We take Randi's post and the concerns she (and others) have raised extremely 
seriously. It is important to understand that the ultimate outcome of her 
complaint, and interaction with Core, was the resignation of the party in 
question’s project commit rights — a result that respected Randi’s specific 
request that action be taken quietly. However, we believe (and agree) that the 
project has much to learn about how best to respond to online abuse and 
harassment. We will better document our procedures — and the changes to them 
that resulted from this experience. These changes in particular will reflect 
how to earlier and better differentiate conflict resolution (for which our 
procedures are currently tuned) and harassment (which demands different 
procedures). It is clear that there are additional improvements to make.

A number of members of the FreeBSD developer community have requested a more 
detailed accounting of the events Randi describes in her article. This will be 
produced. The Core e-mail correspondence involved is quite substantial, and it 
will take several days to sort through to complete a report suitable for 
distribution. The delay is in part because of the necessary confidentiality 
with which reports of harassment and requests for conflict resolution are 
treated: as a matter of policy, and also, commonly, the request of those 
reporting concerns, they do not appear in published Core Reports and hence have 
not been prepared for distribution. We ask for your patience as we prepare this 
material, which may offer an additional view on events.

A brief comment on the Code of Conduct. The Project’s committer guide has long 
required that developers treat each other with respect. Community members will 
hopefully be aware of the more recent (and concrete) Code of Conduct (CoC). 
This document, already under development, was rushed into service (leading to 
less feedback sought than we would have liked) in July 2015 as a result of 
Randi’s report — and has since been updated several times following community 
(and legal) feedback. This CoC is critical to both documenting — and enforcing 
— community standards. It is, of necessity, a living document, and in October 
2015 we appealed to the FreeBSD developer community for volunteers to assist 
with further improvements. We also solicited a number of independent reviewers 
from broader open-source, corporate, and academic communities to assist with 
updating it further (as well as auditing it for implicit bias). The FreeBSD 
developer community was this week (re-)invited to contact the Core Team about 
joining that committee, which had its most recent teleconference in the last 
week of December.

Please do watch this space for further information in the immediate future. 
While this message was initially prepared for the developer community, it is 
one that we are comfortable with being distributing further. However, the 
report to be released next week will be more suitable for public discussion. 
You should also feel free to get in touch with us individually or collectively 
with your concerns or suggestions.

The Core Team

PS The previous message has been adapted from a similar message sent to the 
FreeBSD developers mailing list on 2 January 2015. While intended primarily for 
that audience, it is also suitable for the more broad FreeBSD community, and 
has been posted for that reason.

Attachment: signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature

Reply via email to