Escalation Team

Update on December 22, 2022 – There is an updated Incident Response Team. You can find more information on that in this post: https://make.wordpress.org/project/2022/12/21/announcement-new-wordpress-incident-response-team/

Way back in October at the community summit and then during the team meetupMeetup Meetup groups are locally-organized groups that get together for face-to-face events on a regular basis (commonly once a month). Learn more about Meetups in our Meetup Organizer Handbook. days, we talked about how to deal with inappropriate behavior by people at WP events and contributors on WordPress.orgWordPress.org The community site where WordPress code is created and shared by the users. This is where you can download the source code for WordPress core, plugins and themes as well as the central location for community conversations and organization. https://wordpress.org/. We talked about the need for an escalation team that could handle sensitive issues like harassment reports or complaints around “poisonous people”/ongoing bad behavior in the project, but we didn’t actually create it. In the past week or two we’ve had a few issues come up that fall into this categoryCategory The 'category' taxonomy lets you group posts / content together that share a common bond. Categories are pre-defined and broad ranging., so we’re firing up an escalation team.

I assembled a group of people from various contributor teams who have been involved in discussions around this stuff and/or related issues like sexism, racism, or homophobia in the project community. We’ll all sign a deputiesProgram Supporter Community Program Supporters (formerly Deputies) are a team of people worldwide who review WordCamp and Meetup applications, interview lead organizers, and keep things moving at WordCamp Central. Find more about program supporters in our Program Supporter Handbook.’ confidentiality agreement (once we finalize that agreement today after the team chat), so that people reporting things can rest assured that sensitive issues being reported won’t wind up on Twitter. 🙂 The people on the first round escalation team will be: me, Sam Sidler, Helen Hou-Sandi, Tammie Lister, Aditya Kane, Morten Rand-Hendriksen, and Jenny Wong.

We’ll set up a reporting form on a new make blog so that the form responses will only be seen by the escalation folks who’ve signed confidentiality agreements. We will publicize it once it’s in place, and add it to the code of conductCode of Conduct “A code of conduct is a set of rules outlining the norms, rules, and responsibilities or proper practices of an individual party.” - Wikipedia as a reporting tool.

#escalation, #harassment, #inclusion