– DRAFT –
PWE

<tzviya> Date: 2021-08-10

[chit-chat about how there is some value in chit-chat, because silence is confronting and it helps to have an idea that you can talk to people]

Finding ombudspeople

<tzviya> https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WDsWB4oIBRZLY9KdeIH_WbePUAp0x2z1BSbjna_9UHU/edit?usp=sharing

Tzviya: Sheila shared a draft document for interviewing ombudspeople. Liz suggested we use this kind of document as scenario building.
… How do we do vetting? Can we select the best of the best?

<tzviya> https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WDsWB4oIBRZLY9KdeIH_WbePUAp0x2z1BSbjna_9UHU/edit?usp=sharing

Tzviya reads through the document (as people catch up / refresh their memory)

tzviya: We're not talking about selecting the ombudspeople today

Tobie: Is this a paid position?

tzviya: Don't think so. We have all W3C staff as ombudspeople. A criterion is that they are not WwC management

<tzviya> s/Ww3/W3C

Tzviya: Might that be a conflict of interest?

Judy: As we look to establishing a legal entity, we're considering what kind of HR resources we need, including for PWE functions
… In many settings this is a paid profession. It is possible, in other words. Not sure what W3C will end up with but I think the assumption has mostly been that we would be looking for volunteers - practical consideratin ius difficulty of getting funding for paying

Tobie: As this is presented, we need to be clear about whether it's paid or not.

Tzviya: Please feel free to add comments in the document. Next thing is the questions - how can we write these into scenarios? (We have made this public by sharing it in these minutes…)

• After reviewing the Ombuds job description, what interests you about this role? 

• What steps would you take to prepare for this role

• How would you describe your experience enhancing or advocating for diversity, equity, and inclusion in collaborative workspaces?

• How would you describe your approach to conflict resolution?

• What experience do you have helping others (e.g. peers, teammates) navigate organizational or institutional resources?

• How would you describe your approach to giving and receiving feedback?

• What steps would you take to support someone describing a microaggression they had experienced?

• What are some best practices you follow when engaging in difficult conversations on topics like racism, sexism, transphobia, or ableism?

• Can you describe a time when you had to learn and implement a new set of processes?

Liz: My team does peer to peer learning. It's about whether you can help people to develop, not just buy someone with ready skills.
… So we had a scenario about how to manage a situation like that, and get them to give a complex answer.

<Zakim> tzviya, you wanted to ask if others have interviewed for positions like this

Liz: Point is to get something more thoughtful than "I'll create a training plan".

tzviya: has anyone interviewed for a position like this?

[Chaals: I've had a small amount]

<Barb_H> Added - Threats of any kind, whether explicit or implicit

Judy: I think this is a good framework. Here's my worry: W3C is very complex, the ombuds role is complicated in special ways because you're sort of outside the regular structure. The questions might not get to the heart of how you deal with that.

<Ralph> [Ralph arrives]

Judy: Wat if you hear smething really cmplicated, how do you maintain anonymity and advise?
… Maybe questions about how you handle something that requires urgent intervention, etc.

Wendy: Considering this is a volunteer position, that's a good question in a complex structure. Does this need to be tackled in interview, training, preparatory work to make the role work?
… If we ask for volunteers we need to make sure they have decent support for dealing with hard stuff.

chaals: [thinks "mentors" into the minutes]

<Zakim> tzviya, you wanted to mention training

tzviya: I don't think we want intimate knowledge of everything as a requirement. We want to seperate the role of ombudsperson from discipline.
… To some extent they are a sounding board. There are complexities to understand what somene is going through, but we have to figure out what an Ombudsperson can and cannot do.

<Zakim> tobie, you wanted to ask about whether the position implies knowledge/familiarity about W3C

Tobie: Judy seems to imply the role is for someone familiar with W3C - so ties to whether it's community member, professional, ...

<Zakim> chaals, you wanted to ask about the responsibility of W3C to put response structures in place

Tobie: How much knowledge of our cultural norms do people need to be effective?

Chaals: one thing we need to think about, and for W3C to have in place, is what response structures an Ombuds needs to be able to call on
… in terms of things like "I need to get these people into mediation" or "I need to escalate this to an HR process"
… an Ombuds might be the person to make sure there is fairness and perception of fairness in handling an issue
… but there needs to be an actual process in various places that can create outcomes in enforcement
… what do they expect to be able to call on -- this is important in finding people who can take the role
… there should be some sense that knowing the community thoroughly is not a requirement

<tzviya> reminder of job description https://github.com/w3c/PWETF/blob/main/DraftOmbudsJobDescription.md

Chaals: we should expect that some candidates might not be widely known members of the W3C community
… and we provide them with information about the community as part of our services to them

Tzviya: we don't want ombuds people to define the job, we need to have that clear. Some of that is in place.
… Some will be left up to the person who has gone to the ombudsperson.

Judy: Share the concern chaals expressed - getting the response options in place is hard work - especially in this kind of organisation - and won't happen automagically. Think we will need to drive that if we want to be sure it happens.
… Making sure questions are delegated to the right places will help. We should define the questions, and make sure there *are* appropriate answers.

tzviya: So we have a structure we like, more or less. We need to put this into scenarios. Is somebody willing to write some? Should they be realistically W3C-specific? How do we move this forward?
… Who conducts the interviews?
… Let's start with scenario-writing.
… r who conducts the interviews.

<Ralph> [and should we consider a mechanism to remove an Ombuds given feedback from parties who have interacted with them?]

Judy: THis is a potentially new sub-area of work. Maybe getting some people to noodle on it a bit and sketch something as a start would be worthwhile.

Chaals: in terms of writing scenarios, I am prepared to draft some and invite people to comment critically
… they would be fairly drafty
… I'd expect to write something fast and hope people would refine it
… we are going to need some practice thinking about this
… in terms of who does the interviews, that is hard
… unless we propose tossing out the entire structure we should have a sense of who of the current Ombuds should be involved in the interviewing
… as well as people who are not Ombuds
… it seems unlikely that W3C would decide to pay people in the Ombuds role
… it's going to be painful to put together a process to discuss what went well and what went badly

Wendy: I was going to say for scenarios happy to help review. Could we re-use some stuff that was written for a chairs' meeting last year?

tzviya: Yep, I ahve that. Good idea.

Barb_H: Like the scenaro concept, but if you are an interviewer one thing is to go into a depth in the interview - assign interviewers to a scenario, not having the same scenario/question 5 times.
… To get a level of breadth across interviews.

Judy: From a different direction, some interviewing research is trying to minimise the number / extent of interviews - cost to volunteers is something we should be mindful of.

<tzviya> +1 to keeping the interview process as minimal as possible

Judy: There's a t of stuff here. Maybe we want to prioritise what we actually ask, when we have sorted out the things we might ask.

tzviya: Along those lines, what I have read about interviewing is to shift the tone to conversations not examinations. We are looking for someone who is good at conversations, so that's a sensible process...
… When we look at interviewers we want people who are good at assessing that.
… We are not just looking to replace the ombudspeople, also to rework the program.
… Think we need to give almost as much thought to who interviews the ombudspeople volunteers. Tw interviews, two people?

Judy: Suggest aiming for 3 people in interviews, can pick up an outlier perspective…
… To stop 2 people reaching groupthink too foast

Chaals: having 3 people is a hard interview to do
… volunteers for this position are raising their hand for a really hard job
… the stuff that they have to think about and deal with is inherently complicated
… but I support that the interview not be an inquisitorial exam
… we want people who can be thought ful and communicate perspectives in a de-escalatory manner
… take out the temperature and get to resolutions
… the resolutions can be very confronted
… I agree that 3 interviewers are good and maybe 1 or 2 interviews
… we should be mindful of how good we expect the interviewers to be, particularly in the first 3 or 4 interviews
… we should be prepared to improve

<Zakim> Judy, you wanted to clarify what i meant

Chaals: I suspect we'll look back and realized that we had a lot to learn initially

Judy: If there are 3 interviews it would be in a seperate series, not all together.

<Zakim> tobie, you wanted to mention (1) outreach (2) self-selection of Ombuds (3) that this is a team job

Tobie: We'll have to do outreach - expect that more than having to sift through a mountain of volunteers.
… Would it make sense for existing ombudspeple to self-select new people? Maybe hard as a transition, but asking that group to do that job might make sense.
… My experience is that dealing with problems is teamwork. How much of that have we built in so far?

tzviya: Want to agree that we need to do outreach to recruit. That said, we need to vet the people we do get. In terms of asking ombuds to help us select, I'm not sure we are in a good position yet.

<Zakim> tzviya, you wanted to talk about documenting next steps for ombuds 1) training 2) hand-off

tzviya: Agree about teamwork - would be god for ombudspepople to talk to each other, detect patterns / repeat offenders, … Something we want to work on. And that needs writing. So: next steps?
… We need to work on training and think that needs to be external, need to think about what the hand-off processes are.
… Here is your chance to volunteer!

Judy: Hope people will volunteer. When we talked to International Ombuds' Associaton representative, I recall hearing the ombudsperson is in a role set apart from the organisation - sounding board n hw to work in the organisation, but not necessarily teamwork because there may be a necessity to stand outside the team, and report to the organisation what is missing.

<Zakim> tobie, you wanted to mention the difference between FOSS CoC enforcement process and what we're doing here.

Tobie: There's a difference between how we are thinking of the Ombuds process, and how the open soruce community seems to handle code of conduct violations. We need to be clear about it so we can set clear expectations for our community.

<Zakim> chaals, you wanted to ask why we would restrict ourselves to one ombudsperson per regon, if we had the happy problem of being able to have more

Chaals: why do we restrict ourselves to just one Ombuds per geography?
… if we have more that we believe would do a good job?
… I appreciate the point that to a certain degree Ombuds need to work outside the normal hierarchies
… because perhaps something about the normal hierarchy didn't work
… multiple people outside that space might be able to help each other

tzviya: It didn't occur to me we would get more volunteers.
… if we reach that happy problem, then sure we can have more than one per region.
… We also want to have diversity …
… Expecting the regions to correspond to W3C hosts and their geography.
… So, what work is goig to get done?

<Zakim> Caroline_, you wanted to help with the scenarios

tzviya: Ralph, Judy, might ask you about some of this.

Caroline: I can help with scenaros, bringing a perspective from South America, from women, …

Judy: Interested in the question of what we don't have response processes for. I'm cautious about volunteering, but could create a space for that question in the wiki and invite contributions. Think it would be helpful to give people time to think about it, and brainstorm with Ralph, so the group can start creating something there.

tzviya: Cool, thank you.
… Hoping next meeting to get disciplinary process close to final.
… Rapid / Emergency response is something we don't have a response for.

<Judy> [jb: and we can at least capture things there that we *do* have responses for]

[adjourned]