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The past year has been a busy one for the Drupal Community Working Group (CWG), as we created a new “Community Health Team” and saw the stepping down of the last original member of the Conflict Resolution Team, George DeMet. As the CWG enters its 8th year, we feel it is our duty to continue to pursue our mission to “foster a friendly and welcoming community for the Drupal project and to uphold the Drupal Code of Conduct”. With this guiding principle, we have been focusing on both proactive and reactive tasks to help us achieve this goal. 

This annual report will serve as a summary of what we’ve accomplished over the past year, as well as a discussion of some of our goals for the near future.

Community Health Team

The Community Working Group was expanded during the first half of 2020 with the creation of the Community Health Team. The mission of this new team is to focus on proactive community health tasks including workshops and knowledge transfer. With the help of Tara King, the CWG membership coordinator, we structured the team into several groups. Although team members may do work across multiple groups, each of these groups is designed to, but not limited to, focus on a specific area:

• Community Event Support – provide resources and support related to the Code of Conduct for Drupal events.
• Community Health – provide opportunities to educate and train community members to be more effective contributors.
• Membership – to help identify and recruit community members for the CWG. 
• Ambassadors – provide expertise and advice related to geographic, cultural, and other differences both inside and outside the Drupal community.

Community Health Team members are not privy to Code of Conduct incident reports; however they must adhere to the CWG Code of Ethics.

Once the team was created and volunteers were found for the majority of the roles, we began having monthly meetings during the second half of 2020. The team has already completed a number of tasks including:

• Initial work on a Drupal Code of Conduct update.
• Documentation of CWG roles.
• Development of a group of community health representatives from other open source communities.
• Ongoing Code of Conduct contact workshops.
• Updates to the Drupal event Code of Conduct templates and playbook.
• Ongoing Mental Health First Aid workshops for community members.
• Blog posts related to community health.
• “Nudges” for Drupal Slack Workspace and issue queues.

Other, long term goals for the Community Health Team include providing an on-ramp for the Conflict Resolution Team and identifying and presenting additional community-health-related workshops for the community, 

Conflict Resolution Team

After six years on the Conflict Resolution team, including several years as its chair, George DeMet retired from the team at the end of 2020. We cannot understate how much of an impact George has had on the CWG and the Drupal community, often working behind the scenes. We are fortunate that George has agreed to stay on as a member of the Community Health Team where he will be focusing on updating the Drupal Code of Conduct. 

During 2020, in addition to the creation of the Community Health Team, the Conflict Resolution Team continued to work on on-going and new Code of Conduct related issues. During our weekly meetings, we generally work on three types of tasks:

• Internal business – examples include recruitment, public blog posts and presentations, Aaron Winborn Award, event organizer requests.
• External, old business – ongoing conflict resolution tasks normally brought to us from community members.
• External, new business – new conflict resolution tasks, normally brought to us from community members.

While some conflict resolution tasks can be resolved quickly (a few days), we normally have several long-term, on-going issues that can take anywhere from weeks to months to resolve. Most of the long-term issues include ongoing personality conflicts within the community, but we also routinely work with community members who had previously had their community privileges limited on plans and tasks to have those privileges restored (see our Balancing Accountability and Compassion in the Drupal Community blog post).

What types of conflict resolution issues do we work on?

We decided to perform a quantitative analysis of the number and types of conflict resolution issues we work on, comparing data from 2019 with 2020. Our methodology allowed us to assign one or two of the following categories to each new issue we received during 2019 and 2020:

• Social media conflict
• Issue queue conflict
• Drupal Slack workspace conflict
• In-person Drupal event conflict
• Virtual Drupal event conflict
• Not CWG domain
• Other – examples include content issues on Drupal.org, issues related to local Drupal communities (but not directly related to an event), interpersonal issues occurring in areas not covered by any of the other categories.

In terms of overall number of incidents, while 2019 had 35 total new reported incidents to the CWG, 2020 has slightly less than half of that, with 17 new reported incidents. 

• While the number of incidents occurring at in-person Drupal events dropped from six in 2019 to none in 2020, this doesn’t account for the entire reduction of total incidents between 2019 and 2020. We also saw fewer social media and Drupal Slack workspace conflicts, but the biggest drop was in the “Other” category, which saw a decrease from ten incidents in 2019 to just two in 2020. 
• Obviously, the drop in in-person incident reports is directly related to the pandemic.
• What else can we attribute the dramatic drop in incident reports to? We hope that the formation of the Community Health Team is having some effect, but we’re not so naive to attribute the entire decrease to its creation and actions during 2020. 

Looking forward

Conflict resolution team membership

One of the primary goals of the conflict resolution team in the first part of 2020 was expanding the size of the team. With the recent departure of George DeMet and the decrease in our workload (thanks to fewer incident reports and the amazing work of the Community Health Team), we decided this was a good time to recruit new team members. 

We had six amazing community members approach us about joining the team, and will be inviting a new member(s) to the team in the next few weeks. One of the main goals of the Community Health team was to provide an on-ramp to the Conflict Resolution Team. Those community members who were not extended an offer to join the Conflict Resolution Team will be asked to join the Community Health Team in a capacity of their choosing, if they haven’t joined already.

As part of the process of having new members join the team, we implemented (and are in the process of documenting) a new on-boarding process, where new team members are considered “trial members” for a maximum of 5 months. During this period, new members will mainly shadow the team and have limited access to historical conflict resolution reports. At the conclusion of the trial period new members will either become regular members or be asked to leave the team. As is prescribed by our charter, all trial members must be approved by the CWG Review Panel. 

Community Health Team

Now that our Community Health Team is a year old and has some experience under its belt, we have high hopes that they will continue to be a force for good in the community. Our plans for the next year include finding and presenting additional workshops, completing the aforementioned Drupal Code of Conduct update, and assisting with the expansion of the yet-to-have-a-good-name group of community health volunteers from various open source communities.