Once again, thanks everyone for all the feedback here and over DMs. Really appreciate everyone’s involvement in this. Below is our response. Feel free to nudge us if we missed somethig!
Scope of the Code of Conduct
The list of spaces has been modified to better capture the essence of the spaces this Code of Conduct applies to (thanks to Xavier & Gabriel for the wording)
These rules apply to the projects hosted in the GitHub ocaml organization, the discuss.ocaml.org forum, the caml-list@inria.fr mailing list, OCaml IRC, OCaml discord, physical events like OCaml Workshop, and any other OCaml-related space that adopted this Code of Conduct. A more comprehensive list of spaces is available at the code-of-conduct GitHub repository.
Built-in moderation tools
Platforms such as discuss have built-in moderation tools to make it easier to bring something to the attention of the moderators. At the moment, we think it might be best to keep admin activities such as spam filtering and Code of Conduct violations separate. We may want to display Code of Conduct details at platforms like discuss/discord etc. Happy to sync on this with the admins and moderators of the various platforms on this.
Offline events
This code of conduct document can serve as a good place to start for offline events such as OCaml workshop, Mirage retreat, local meetups etc., but it may not be sufficient to cover all the needs for physical events. The Code of Conduct team is willing to work with organisers of OCaml related physical events to improve the text and help with moderation.
Violations outside community spaces
We understand inhibitions about including violations outside community spaces, though we think it’s important not to skip it in the text. It is in order to account for interactions not within the places we’ve listed explicitly; such as direct messages, private mailing lists etc. in the context of OCaml community. Hopefully we have little need to fall back to this clause, and even when there is it will be evaluated in a case by case basis.
Reporting
As mentioned in the document itself, the rules apply to everyone in the community. We would like to make it clear that there are no exceptions to this, including Code of Conduct committee members. If a report is submitted on a committee member, the report will be treated as any other report, the committee composed by all members except the one reported against. If any other member wants to recuse themselves for whatever reason, they will be free to do so. In fact, members will be free to recuse themselves for any report before the discussions start, e.g. if the reporter or the person whom it is reported against is close to the member. This is one of the reasons individual emails to contact members are made available, people are free to contact a subset of the committee members to submit a violation report. Again, the member will recuse from the process when they themselves are reporting a violation. If a member’s actions are found to be in strong violation of the CoC, after necessary steps are taken, they may also be asked to resign and a new member inducted.
Next steps
The text has a more permanent place at GitHub - ocaml/code-of-conduct: Documents related to the Code of Conduct. You are welcome to use it for your OCaml projects. Recommendations for using this Code of Conduct can be found in the repository. Feel free to get in touch or use the issue tracker if you have questions.