Adding Welcoming/Coduct Guide to uPortal

[Christian Murphy]

Hey All,

There recently there has been a lot of great work towards taking uPortal tradition and putting it into writing that can be easily understood and shared.

The next area I would like to see added, is uPortal's tradition of being friendly and welcoming.

Across open source many projects have been solidifying these ideals with a `CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md` in the repository, uPortal could do the same.

There are several starters that could be used to get started on a document:

• Apereo has a Welcoming Guide <https://www.apereo.org/content/apereo-welcoming-policy>
• The Contributor Covenant is widely adopted across open source <http://contributor-covenant.org/>
• The Citizen Code of Conduct gives in depth guide <http://citizencodeofconduct.org/>

I've opened pull requests based on Apereo Welcoming <https://github.com/Jasig/uPortal/pull/926> and the Contributor Covenant <https://github.com/Jasig/uPortal/pull/925>.

I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on how we could best articulate uPortal's tradition of welcoming.

Best Regards,

Christian Murphy

[Andrew Petro]

I -1'ed the Contributor Covenant PR specifically.

I am of course against harassment and in favor of welcoming and inclusive.

My concern is that Apereo uPortal does not have the maturity and capacity to reliably fulfill the expectations of the Contributor Covenant at this time. It would be worse to more formally set expectations that we are not prepared to reliably fulfill than it is to not set those expectations.

I'd love to be convinced otherwise. Build out the organizational capacity and policy and practices and volunteers to handle Code of Conduct issues, and I'll gladly +1 adding a Code of Conduct document that reflects that reality. Implementation first; expectation setting that this has been implemented, after it's been implemented.

Kind regards,

Andrew

[Andrew Petro]

uPortal already comes under the scope of Apereo's Welcoming Policy. So I like Jim Helwig's expedient of our project simply linking to that.

But even there, let's not get too comfortable. The policy states that

Apereo will designate two Board members to receive complaints.

But the policy page doesn't make clear who these Board members are or how one would contact them.

There are open source software projects and communities that take codes of conduct seriously. It can be awesome. It's a good thing. I'm conceptually very in favor. I'm willing to help. 

We need careful honesty in the expectations we set, since would-be participants should be able to rely upon the representations in our policies.

-Andrew

[Marissa Warner-Wu]

I'm replying to this to share out, as I realised I accidentally only replied to Christian earlier and not to the list...

Christian - Yes, I like the idea of having special interest groups. If anyone wants to start a UX group I will join in a heartbeat. ;)

Andrew - Agreed that we shouldn't set expectations which aren't realistic. At the moment the uPortal community is quite small, but I think as it grows these will come more into play.

On Mon, Jun 19, 2017 at 6:15 PM, Christian Murphy <christian...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi Marisa,

I don't think we have met.

I'm Christian Murphy, I work at Unicon Inc.

I've been a part of the uPortal community for over a year, and have been an official committer for four months.

My area of expertise is user experience development.

Some of my interests include software quality, process management, and semantic web design.

Nice to meet you!

I agree that it would be nice to encourage committers to share some information about themselves to help people get to know each other.

It would probably be best to link to the committers profile on GitHub and allow each person to share as much as they feel comfortable.

I don't want to, in the process of making uPortal more welcoming to new community members, accidentally dox existing members. 🙂

I also like the idea of being able to easily reach out to other members with expertise and interest in a specific area. Creating interest-based and expertise-based teams that can be contacted would an excellent idea in my opinion.

Both of your ideas are really good! Would you be comfortable sharing them with the uPortal-dev list?

Best Regards,

Christian Murphy

On Mon, Jun 19, 2017 at 1:28 AM Marissa Warner-Wu <mwar...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi Christian,

I would love to see this. I was talking about this with the Madison guys when I was visiting them a few weeks back. One thing which I think would be useful for new people is brief bios of the committers. It's quite intimidating going into the mailing list and not knowing who anyone is (I'm still not sure who everyone is, even after all this time!). You can see people's names in the COMMITTERS.md. I'd suggest we add (either in this file or elsewhere) some additional info, like:

- Where they work

- How long have they been a committer

- Areas of interest

In welcome info we could then point people to go look at this. This would at least give new folk an idea of who they are talking to, and who to ask about particular things.

-Marissa

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[Andrew Petro]

I liked Jim's proposed solution so much, I implemented his solution in a Pull Request.

It'd be a fine thing for all Committers (and others) to review.  Should that change set, or a version evolved from it, merge, it'd be best if it does so with apparent overwhelming consensus. Adding even this CODE_OF_CONDUCT to the project represents a renewed commitment by this community to uphold the Welcoming Policy, so let's affirm we really mean it.

Kind regards,

Andrew

[COUSQUER Christian]

>” I don't want to, in the process of making uPortal more welcoming to new community members, accidentally dox existing members.”

> “Creating interest-based and expertise-based teams that can be contacted would an excellent idea in my opinion.”

 

I’m +1000 with all that Christian has said J

Christian

 

De : uport...@apereo.org [mailto:uport...@apereo.org] De la part de Marissa Warner-Wu
Envoyé : lundi 19 juin 2017 23:47
À : uPortal Developers <uport...@apereo.org>
Objet : Re: [uportal-dev] Adding Welcoming/Coduct Guide to uPortal

 

Christian Murphy

 

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[Jim Helwig]

I am following up with the Board on this.

[Jim Helwig]

I have mixed feelings about “special interest groups” but it may well be because I am not familiar with the implementation details. 

First and foremost, I would like to encourage more discussions around particular topics, for example UX. We have a great mix of people with expertise in certain topics and people eager to learn and discuss. Getting them connected and talking should be encouraged. 

My concern is that if we create separate channels for that discussion, then those of us that are not plugged into that channel will miss out. We previously had a plethora of email lists but when we moved under the apereo.org domain we decided to discontinue using many of them and instead direct the conversations to the general uportal-user list. This increased the number of people that were exposed to the topics. The one case where it may make sense to create a list is if the topic is meant to span across Apereo projects. An example of that is the new Accessibility group. But even then, one could argue that Accessibility should be important to everyone and perhaps should continue to be discussed on the general op...@apereo.org list.

I am not sure how Github teams would be used. I view github as primarily a developer resource. As a non-developer, I know it is there and occasional review a pull request but I am generally not monitoring communication and activity in it. I could see perhaps that if a team was created around a specific topic, then a developer could elect to notify that team about a particular pull request they would like the team to be aware of.

But in general, I am thinking that it is healthy to discuss topics such as UX, accessibility, etc. as they pertain to uPortal on the general uportal-dev and uportal-user lists.  Let’s keep these lists lively and full of posts on new topics!

Just my thoughts. I am very open to hearing alternative views on how we best communicate!

JimH

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[Andrew Petro]

To Marissa's "If anyone wants to start a UX group I will join in a heartbeat. ;)" I say, Marissa, if you'd like to spin up a UX group I'd support that in a heartbeat. Spin it up. Whatever that means to you. Apereo-wide, within-uPortal, either way. The most important thing is to do it -- we can all evolve it from there.

[Jim Helwig]

+1!

In retrospect, I could see where my email sounds like it came from a cranky old man. (Not to slight our senior members! As one of the oldest individuals in the community and an AARP card holder, I speak from experience.)  It is almost always better to do something than to sit around trying to figure out what might be optimal. I’ll join in whatever form this takes!

JimH

[Andrew Petro]

On how many open email lists to have:

More specific (open) email lists can help participants to feel more comfortable posting (because it's less likely to be perceived by poster or reader as "noise" -- when posted to the right channel it's more tightly tied to a topic the recipients specifically chose to plug in to.)

I think in practice we sometimes see a pattern play out of people wanting to bounce topical conversations out of broad open lists into more specific contexts. Fork that infrastructure conversation off of open@ into an infrastructure-specific context. Fork that licensing discussion into a licensing-specific context. Fork that accessibility conversation into an accessibility-specific context. And here, fork that UX conversation into a UX-specific context. This desire to bounce conversations into more specific contexts to contain the noise is natural and aspects of it are healthy and in any case it's the human nature we've got. So let's run with it. What Apereo needs to do, what uPortal needs to do, is ensure that we have effective open contexts to catch these conversations when they bounce. The alternative to catching them is to drop them on the floor or into closed contexts.

I think in practice we're not having some conversations, some would-be posts are not being posted, because would-be posters are intimidated by the idea of creating this noise so broadly, that the communication might not be appreciated by a big enough proportion of its recipients.

Open participation, open archives email lists have great properties for enabling openness and fluidity of openness. Everyone can choose what lists to participate in how much. Maybe you're closely following and regularly posting. Maybe you consume via periodic digest. Maybe you're lurking. Maybe you occasionally skim the archives. Maybe you only come across it via a Google search or only when someone links you to it. Maybe you read, sleep on it, and a while later post something thoughtful to an aging thread. Each participant cannot maximally participate in all the things. More, topic-specific, fully open lists make it more possible to effectively participate in a personally relevant subset of the things to preferred degrees.

Part of making the channels open is making them discoverable, search indexed, appropriately cross-linked, inviting, and publicly archived. This minimizes the "those of us that are not plugged into the channel will miss out". If you don't want to miss out, plug into the channel. Effectively plugging in is both a responsibility of the participant (appreciate the available channels and plug in where it makes sense) and a responsibility of our community (make it feasible for participants to appreciate the available channels and plug in where it makes sense).

Switching from Google Groups to Discourse might help. This was a point in a recent OSBridge conference presentation about how to build better communities.

There's certainly room for more traffic on uportal-user@ and uportal-dev@.

But I think there's also certainly room for more lists.

The most important thing about communicating is to do it. The most important thing about ideas in open source communities is to run with them. The most important thing about participants with passion for an idea, about volunteers in an open source community, is to enable and support them in doing. If Marissa or anyone else would like to see a more specific sub-list created, I say great, let's create it and see what happens. Worst case we learn something from the experiment and still have some lovely public archives of the new list's conversations to do whatever good they can do and realize we'd rather have those conversations going forward in some other (preferably, open) context. It's not such a bad worst case. Best case is we birth a vibrant new sub-group that everyone can plug into as much or as little as makes sense. It's a best case worth enabling.

Kind regards,

Andrew

On Wednesday, June 21, 2017 at 6:47:40 AM UTC-5, jim.helwig wrote:

I have mixed feelings about “special interest groups” but it may well be because I am not familiar with the implementation details. 

First and foremost, I would like to encourage more discussions around particular topics, for example UX. We have a great mix of people with expertise in certain topics and people eager to learn and discuss. Getting them connected and talking should be encouraged. 

My concern is that if we create separate channels for that discussion, then those of us that are not plugged into that channel will miss out. We previously had a plethora of email lists but when we moved under the apereo.org domain we decided to discontinue using many of them and instead direct the conversations to the general uportal-user list. This increased the number of people that were exposed to the topics. The one case where it may make sense to create a list is if the topic is meant to span across Apereo projects. An example of that is the new Accessibility group. But even then, one could argue that Accessibility should be important to everyone and perhaps should continue to be discussed on the general op...@apereo.org list.

I am not sure how Github teams would be used. I view github as primarily a developer resource. As a non-developer, I know it is there and occasional review a pull request but I am generally not monitoring communication and activity in it. I could see perhaps that if a team was created around a specific topic, then a developer could elect to notify that team about a particular pull request they would like the team to be aware of.

But in general, I am thinking that it is healthy to discuss topics such as UX, accessibility, etc. as they pertain to uPortal on the general uportal-dev and uportal-user lists.  Let’s keep these lists lively and full of posts on new topics!

Just my thoughts. I am very open to hearing alternative views on how we best communicate!

JimH

On Jun 19, 2017, at 4:47 PM, Marissa Warner-Wu <mwar...@gmail.com> wrote:

[...]

Christian - Yes, I like the idea of having special interest groups. If anyone wants to start a UX group I will join in a heartbeat. ;)

[...] 

[Marissa Warner-Wu]

Andrew and Jim - in like Flynn! I hope this means you are joining. ;)

--

[Andrew Petro]

Indeed. No one can participate fully in all the things, but I'll at least lurk on an email list specifically about UX in uPortal, say.  I expect more than a few others would as well. I predict it'd hit critical mass, at least to get off the ground for a while.

-Andrew

[Aaron Grant]

I'd be interested as well, OU is also always trying to improve UX and support this.

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Aaron Grant
Senior Applications Architect
Oakland University - UTS

[Marissa Warner-Wu]

Aaron - yes, that would be great! I thought of you as I know you have an interest in accessibility.

Andrew - absolutely, lurkers welcome. ;)

[Andrew Petro]

Example from a parallel community: Fluid Infusion recently adopted a (rigorous, admirable, inspiring) Code of Conduct.

[Andrew Petro]

Progress! The Welcoming Policy now clarifies how one would contact the Duty Officers.

This reduces risks in uPortal's reliance on the Apereo Welcoming Policy to function as our Code of Conduct.

-Andrew

On Wednesday, June 21, 2017 at 6:31:18 AM UTC-5, jim.helwig wrote:

I am following up with the Board on this.

[Andrew Petro]

Maybe we should go a bit further on this. HashiCorp's example inspires.