Hi all, I’m going to start off by stressing these are my personal opinions only.
Just to clarify - the intention with the CoC Team wasn't to replace the Trusted Contacts necessarily. But yeah, I think that if we have a CoC Team, then it's probably not necessary and if the existing TC members were to receive the additional training that the CoC Team would get, they could easily nominate themselves to be on the team. Having two bodies around this may be confusing and we definitely do not want that.
I came away from the community plenary, and the associated IRC chatter, quite disillusioned about being a Trusted Contact and trying to help make the RIPE meeting inclusive. We’re part of the existing CoC (and yes, there is an existing CoC), which was described as “not fit for purpose.” However, I don’t want to dwell on that, I want to move on to getting the improved CoC into place, because whilst it is important to get it right, I also think the longer we keep talking about it, the more likely it is to be seen that we as a community are, for some reason, pushing against improving the CoC, and that’s not a good look. One thing that concerns me more is that we receive very few reports to the TCs despite comments about reportable events occurring, and I would like to understand why that is the case. Are people not reporting because trying to find one of the three of us is too difficult? Because people aren’t sure what to report? Because we’re the wrong people? Because we aren’t perceived to be able to follow the reports up? I don’t think it’s the latter, because newcomers probably aren’t as jaded about the role of TC as some on this list appear to be. I think understanding this is important, because if people aren’t reporting events to the Trusted Contacts, we don’t know if they’ll report them to the new Code of Conduct team. Perhaps asking whether an event was reported to the TCs, and if not why not, might have been a useful question to have asked on the survey. FWIW, I do not see a role for both the Trusted Contacts and the CoC Team. Again, this is just my opinion! Cheers, Rob