Carbon Language community transparency report through 2024-12-31

[CelineausBerlin]

The Carbon community works to be welcoming and kind among itself and to others,
with a deep commitment to psychological safety, and we want to ensure that
doesn’t change as we grow and evolve. To that end, we have a few ground rules
that we ask all community members to adhere to:

• be welcoming,
• be friendly and patient,
• be considerate,
• be kind,
• be careful in the words that we choose,
• when we disagree, try to understand why, and
• recognize when progress has stopped, and take a step back.

The following summary is intended to help the community understand what kinds of
Code of Conduct incidents were brought to our attention lately, and how we
dealt with them.

Publishing such transparency reports on a regular basis is helping us track
progress and hold ourselves accountable to high standards of community culture.

Summary

It’s been yet another peaceful quarter in our community spaces towards the end
of 2024, with yet again little need for active moderation. Almost everyone kept
exchanges on-topic, constructive and friendly in the last months.
So, we’re off to a good start this year, and we pledge to keep leading by
example while welcoming more contributors in the coming months!
Our crowd grew slightly, both on Discord and GitHub, with 4,924 members on our
Discord server and 162 contributors on GitHub when this report was published.
Which means we have 8 more people effectively building Carbon at this point than
in September 2024, and that is quite something!
If we keep on track with our roadmap, and reach our Carbon 1.0 milestone, we can
expect way more people to join us. It’s going to be an exciting year!

To help with moderation and potential conduct issues, we have still 11 trained
people to count on, including our community lead who serves as their guide,
trainer and coach.
Our moderation and conduct team members are contributing from 3 different
continents.

Our AutoMod bots are helping us on Discord, automatically catching the use of
some harmful language and spam. The idea is to be able to focus on the
educational and conversational part of our moderation role, and automate what
does not need a human to be taken adequate care of. Indeed, some things are
best taken care of by our bots, and some by us, humans. So, we are keeping in
check what the right balance between automated and manual moderation is, and
are making adjustments on the way when appropriate.

Please note that some incidents may have escaped our attention. You can help us
keep our spaces welcoming and fostering a spirit of collaboration, and report
any situation that may require our intervention:
https://github.com/carbon-language/carbon-lang/blob/trunk/CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md

Our interventions from 2024-10-01 through 2024-12-31

In Q4 2024, our AutoMod bots have caught and blocked posts containing harmful
language from 2 users. One of them readily made the necessary changes to their
message after our bot’s hint, while the other one kept using various forms of
harmful language, also posting other types of destructive comments. Their
messages were automatically blocked every time, and they were manually banned
for this behavior accordingly.
One account posted spam, and was banned, during that same period.

There were also repeated off-topic comments by 2 users on GitHub, which
were hidden, and one user was warned to avoid further such comments.
We also hid another couple of repeated comments in various channels on
Discord by a single user, who was asked to refrain from cross-posting.

Closing observations

We ended our second year working in the public eye with a healthy constructive
contribution culture. So, everyone could focus on making progress on Carbon and
our moderation and conduct group could take some time to attend several
advanced moderation training sessions on skills we were lacking confidence in.
So, we now feel more prepared for what’s coming our way this year than ever.

We’ll keep watching and providing support when needed, and are hoping for more
contributions from new members, while keeping it friendly and kind at all times.

Thank you all for your contributions, good spirits and all the best for 2025!

The Carbon Code of Conduct team, 2025-01-27