Hello!
Hi! On behalf of the community council, I’m writing you this status
update to let you know how we’re doing. We haven’t done one of these
updates in a while, so we hope it’s interesting.
tl;dr: Nothing is currently on fire.
Our activities at present fall into two main categories: reacting to existing situations that we’ve been asked to address, and proactively looking into our policies to see how to improve them in the future.
In the first category, we have three ongoing (but unfortunately slow-moving) cases. One involves a hacker conference where we are seeking clarity about their safety policies; two involve people in the broader hacker community. We hope to have all of these resolved well before the end of this CC’s tenure.
In the second category, we’re working in two directions to try to improve decision-making for future community councils, so that they can do their jobs more effectively:
-
We’re working on a conflict-of-interest policy for community council
members. (We don’t have any COI cases before us now, but we think
it’s a good idea to get a solid policy written before one comes
up, to prevent arguments.) -
We’re working on a more formal information-continuity policy for the
community council. (At present, the community council does not keep
permanent records of past cases from one council to the next. This
protects privacy, but opens us to misunderstandings and possible
manipulation as council members rotate.) We are looking for a
‘sweet spot’ to allow us to preserve privacy while ensuring that
future community councils have a reliable way to reach out to former
councils for information.
Finally, to anybody thinking of volunteering the community council in the future: I’d strongly recommend it. The workload has been quite manageable, the people have been professional and kind, and the stress levels have been (so far) comparatively low.
best wishes,
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Nick