RFC 102 establishes the Moderation Team, and sets out the following rules for how moderation should be done:
The team should utilize the NixOS Foundation mission and the following statement during their duties:
The NixOS Foundation aims to promote participation without regard to gender, sexual orientation, disability, ethnicity, age, or similar personal characteristics. We want to strive to create and foster community by providing an intentionally welcoming and safe environment where all feel valued and cared for, and where all are given opportunity to participate meaningfully. The Foundation will work with the community in service of this goal.
Aside from this, “with oversight via the RFC process and input from the NixOS Foundation”, how moderation decisions should be made is unspecified, and therefore up to the team.
In the past year we have encountered a number of difficult situations, and we have come to the conclusion that basing our moderation actions on a written document will help us do our job as moderators. It gives us a tool that we can point people to, and also a clear place to find for reporting misbehavior. Another small motivation is that introducing a code of conduct would unblock some funding/free services (eg: Netlify) for the project.
After looking around, we found that the Contributor Covenant 1.4 is close enough to our current practices, so we are taking that, slightly modified to reflect the structure of our community. As we encounter new situations, we might adjust and modify the code of conduct to best suit our needs. We believe this is in line with the rules established for the Moderation Team by RFC 102.
This doesn’t change the fact that the Moderation Team is overseen by the community via the RFC process, and that the community can issue further instructions, guidelines, or rules for the Moderation Team to follow via accepted RFCs. For example, if an RFC established a different code of conduct, we would use that for making moderation decisions instead.
Of course, there may well be situations that require moderator action that are not explicitly mentioned in the code of conduct. The code of conduct should therefore not be interpreted as an exhaustive set of rules, rather as guidelines for appropriate behavior in our community.
Please take this time to review our Code of Conduct.
If you have any feedback, please contact us at community@nixos.org or in the #moderation:nixos.org Matrix channel.
- The NixOS Moderation Team
Thanks Ryan and the whole Moderation Team for your work!