Handling conflict in the Joomla! Community

On the 9th of December 2016 we temporarily banned a highly active and respected member of our community, an action we hoped we never had need to take.

With this ban we wish to send a clear signal to everyone in the community that conflict will be taken seriously regardless of who is involved. As a community we are committed to creating a healthy, safe and non-toxic environment for everyone to not only contribute, but to thrive in.

We understand how much you care about the Joomla! Community and know that you rely on us as leadership to act in the best interests of The Project, but on the 9th of December, we failed to communicate and coordinate to the level you rightfully expect and more importantly deserve.

We are deeply sorry for this and would like to share with you the events that took place and the steps we are taking to prevent a repeat of this in the future.

The Conflict Resolution Team (CRT) was formed in October 2016 as part of the new Code of Conduct voted for by The Joomla! Leadership in August 2015. The community members who created the CoC and CRT Operating Procedures had all stepped down. In order to put the voted CoC and Guidelines into action each leadership team voted for a representative to put an initial temporary team in place.

The CRT received a report on the 13 of November 2016. The report detailed a series of social media posts on the 20 of October 2016 containing behaviour that breaks the Joomla! Code of Conduct (CoC).

Although the reported community member has a high profile and an outstanding track record of contributions to The Project, the member also has an equal track record of repeated CoC breaches.

The CRT reviewed the report and due to the history of repeated incursions by the reported community member put a proposed a sanction of a 3-month ban from the Project alongside a Non Disclosure Agreement (NDA) to the Leadership team vote. With the aim of the proposed sanction being a change in behaviour of the reported community member.

The vote passed with the required ⅔ majority vote, and the ban was enacted at 15:00 UTC on the 9th of December 2016, expiring at 14:49 UTC on the 9th of March 2017

We understand that the enactment of the ban was handled far from optimally and we failed to communicate the decision with team leaders and the wider community whilst implementing the ban itself along 31 services. Leadership and the CRT are reviewing their policies and processes as a result of this to ensure that any future sanction is handled with greater care and communication, both to the community at large and to any team leaders whose workflow would be impacted as a result.

We have also heard and taken onboard the Community’s reaction to the NDA and would like to make it clear that its intention was to protect the reported parties, not to hide behind the details of our decision as has been suggested. We believe that this statement helps to rectify this misconception without disclosing full details of incident or the parties involved. Transparency does not mean full disclosure and these parameters will be kept in the future to protect the parties involved in any reports and/or sanctions.

We would like to formally and wholeheartedly apologise to the Community for the uncertainty and confusion our handling of the sanction enactment has caused, especially the miscommunication that occurred shortly after the sanction was actioned.

To sum up, we would like to assure the Community that we have learned valuable lessons from this situation which will be used to improve our handling of these matters moving forward and will communicate these improvements as they are implemented in the future.