Creating official policies and procedures for local group admin/managers

Hi Alex - really glad you've brought this up, as I've also been watching this mess from the sidelines for FAR too long, and haven't felt able to do much to help deal with it.

As a local user group admin myself, I feel almost like having a code of conduct or rules is a bit heavy handed, and too formal. My sense would be that it goes a bit against the do-ocracy style or organizing many groups have run with.

That said the more loosely organized do-ocracy depends on admins and leader being good respectable community members, setting good examples, and not driving away existing or potential members. I would have hoped that this would have self-corrected ages ago, and that it would have been made very clear by the rest of the local group (not just the targets of the conflict) that it's completely unacceptable behaviour.

Of course, because the incidents have involved leaders it's made this self-correction very difficult, as nobody wants to kick longstanding members and leaders from the group. So either we'll need a code of conduct, or for more "higher up" community members (as much as there are) to step in and mediate and/or deal with the situation.

I'm at a bit of a loss being that we've never had anything like this happen in any of the groups in the area I live in, but the whole situation is extremely sad to me, being that it's driving away fantastic contributors, and surely looks terrible having such things representing the Drupal community in that area.

I'm a huge fan of the Ubuntu Code of Conduct and the good it can do for our Community. At launchpad.net, you can optionally 'sign' the code of conduct in your user profile which is a powerful way for community members to declare how they want to interact in the community. I think we should push ofr signing of the code of conduct in the drupal.org profile.

There are a few reasons that I brought up the Drinking Liberally example above, but the biggest is the connection between online and real world communities, which I believe have a large effect on the growth of Drupal itself. Some quick personal examples that illustrate the importance to my own (and my company's) growth within the community: I met my business partner at the Philly meetup, met another of our Sr Devs at a Philly meetup, and I met our earliest "big" client at the NYC meetup.

With that in mind, I'd like to point to some of the general issues that I have perceived within the NY group (many of them involved the same problematic individual, in one way or another), which were faced by Drinking Liberally in some way as well:

• 'Hijacking' of the local groups by a single company or organization, or 'Community Capture'. One of the earliest issues DL faced was with organizations (mostly candidates, but also local Democratic orgs) 'taking over' local groups and trying to use them for their own purpose. These take over attempts led many to stop attending DL, and others to try and start their own DL chapter. With the NY group there has been some anger over the perceived hijacking of the group by Fast Company employees, who are both the g.d.o meetups as well as the meetup admins. There are now two distinct meetups (there were in the past two, though the one on meetup wasn't well attended at all, and now seems abandoned), and while I don't think they were set up to be competitors (one is a formal meeting, one is for drinking with drupallers), they seem to be moving in that direction at this point. (I don't think that this is clear cut at all, and I personally love the FC space, but I do know that a few prominent local leaders don't like to attend meetups there because of the security).

• Speaking for the group without permission. I believe in the notion of do-ocracy but within a community a do-acracy can quickly come to feel like a dictatorship when the actions of the doer are not supported by the rest of the community. In the case of the NY group, the admin tried signing contracts and starting a site on behalf of the group, solely because he was assigned as the admin on g.d.o.

• Disrespectful/Inappropriate behavior. This is the most obvious issue at the moment, and prob. the most common faced by online/offline communities. While it's great that so many of the g.d.o/meetup admins/leaders show great community leadership, and many of these issues are self correcting, there is a real issue when the behavior is coming from a community leader.

For the last item I believe that a Code of Conduct is sufficient, but for the first two I'm not as certain. At the very least I think it will require someone (or, more likely, a group of people) who are responsible for interacting with local group admins/leaders, and who are empowered to resolve conflicts as they arise.

From what I've observed, do-ocracy is a great model for dealing with code management, it allows for a great deal of flexibility. However, in the case of local community groups I find do-ocracy to be an inherently flawed model of operating... it's entirely too subjective, it assumes that people know what to do in the case of conflict, it can result in a dictatorship arising or in leaders who are ineffective because they're not sure what they're supposed to be doing.

Being tied to the NYC community, I would say that the a large part of the trouble is there is a great deal of uncertainty on what the best way to handle the situation actually is. For a practical example, I think just about everyone is in agreement that there needs to be a new community manager for the g.d.o group, but it's unclear on how we're supposed to decide who that person is going to be. The first person to volunteer? Should it be a position that's elected? Should we be waiting for consensus? Should we be pushing for someone to take that role in the interim while we decide how we're going to select it? The result of a great deal of uncertainty is inaction on a situation that needs to be resolved sooner than later, and a group of people who are uncomfortable and impatient that the issue isn't already resolved. That isn't good.

I'll second the motion to take a look at the Ubuntu community. I think a Code of Conduct would be a wonderful thing for the Drupal community to adopt, however I also think we ought to observing how Ubuntu manages their LoCo (Local Community) Teams (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LoCoTeams). Ubuntu's a pretty hierarchal project so it's kinda lengthy to get into how exactly everything works (but I will summarize on request) and I think a lot of how their system works isn't applicable to how the Drupal community operates, but there are a few things that I found particularly helpful about the way the Ubuntu community handles conflict when I was involved with a LoCo Team that experienced conflict.

One, a clearly defined conflict resolution process for groups. (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LoCoResolvingProblems)

Two, mentors. Mentors are people who are experienced with the process of starting a LoCo Team and are assigned to teams forming in other areas of the world to be there to answer questions about the process, help advise regarding allocating resources, and guiding through the conflict resolution process if need be.

Three, the LoCo Council. Part of their role is to approve LoCo Teams for resource allocation reasons, but they also handle conflict resolution in cases where the LoCo Team cannot resolve it's issue without outside intervention (aka a leader who's not acting appropriately and refuses to transfer administrator status to another member).

For example of how this played out in actual conflict, a few years ago, I was involved with a LoCo Team in which the individual who started the team decided the group was his and that he could make unilateral decisions on how the group operated and communicated, group consensus was different from what he was proposing and his response was to say that what the group wanted didn't matter. He acted aggressively towards members of the area LUG, and was behaving in a manner that was against Ubuntu's Code of Conduct which he had signed because he was an Ubuntu member. Our group advisor pointed us to the outlined conflict resolution document, and we went through the steps of conflict resolution. When we approached him privately, he claimed the group was his and he was under no obligation to uphold group consensus. When we brought the issue to the group as a whole, he disappeared entirely from the group and IRC, and was unresponsive to requests to hand over administrator status to the group's mailing list and wiki page when we voted that we wanted him removed. The issue ended up going to the LoCo Council where he was given the opportunity to come forth and defend his actions, but declined and the community council reassigned ownership to the group with who we elected to have it. At that point, the LoCo council also made a recommendation on whether or not this individual ought to be reviewed by the Community Council, which handles things like breeches in the Code of Conduct, granting and revoking Ubuntu membership, and banning from the community outright.

The experience wasn't particularly comfortable (conflict isn't), however the way Ubuntu structured itself made everything extremely clear. There was never any question on how things were supposed to be handled, everything was well documented and people who were familiar with the process were always available for questions if they arose, and everything was handled in such a way that the LoCo itself was encouraged to do everything in it's power to resolve the situation on it's own.

In contrast to my experience dealing with conflict in the Ubuntu community, dealing with conflict in the Drupal community has been nothing short of a nightmare.

I've offered the following very lightweight process to our NYC group and wanted to cross-offer it here as well: [DRAFT] Conflict and Community Standards

Those interested in this conversation should be sure to check out the proposed Drupal Code of Conduct - http://groups.drupal.org/dcoc