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Second Iteration of Drafting the Codidact Arbitration & Review Panel
About a month ago I shared our first draft for a Review Panel. Read through that post to find the motivation for this idea:
It should be clear that such a process shouldn't involve "us" (the Codidact team), but rather "you" (the community). Hence, at some point, it was decided on the old forum that we'd eventually have some kind of review panel, which would be responsible for these cases.
While there will probably be no "panel elections" for the time being, because the panel members would still be a large percentage of our community members (which wouldn't exactly make sense at this stage), we have made a start on the Panel review process. It is based on these three principles:
- The Panel decisions are binding to moderators and the Codidact team.
- Every party should be heard before any decision is made.
- The Panel shall be independent and impartial.
There was a lot of great feedback, which I tried to address by replying to the points and based on that, I built a list with points that needed reconsideration.
So here I am, posting a refined version of the governing rules for our Codidact Arbitration and Review panel. I've included them into this post and you can also find a PDF version here.
Expand to read the governing rules
Codidact Arbitration & Review Panel
Governing Rules
PREAMBLE
The Arbitration & Review Panel is a panel of Codidact users whose function is to adjudicate on certain matters that are important to Codidact-hosted communities. It adjudicates independently to make clear that these processes are transparent and accountable; involved parties, including Codidact itself, have input to the processes but do not make the decisions, helping to eliminate inherent bias.
The Panel’s primary duties are reviewing moderator actions, or, in more serious cases, reviewing whether a moderator is suitable for the role or should be removed. This doesn’t mean that the Panel is the only group who can do those things – in all cases, attempts should be made to resolve disputes at the lowest level possible (for instance, by posting in the relevant Meta category or by a moderator team working together to resolve a dispute). By the time a matter is brought to the Panel, there should already be records of attempts to solve it in other ways.
This document contains the rules that govern how the Panel works and is run.
TITLE 1
ELECTION
ARTICLE 1
The Panel consists of 7 members of the Codidact network, who are elected for two-year terms in the same manner as the community board positions. Each year the community elects enough members to bring the panel to 7. In the first election, the three members with the lowest vote scores shall be elected for one-year terms only. Members may be elected again for one additional consecutive term, after which they are ineligible to serve again for a period of one term.
ARTICLE 2
Anyone who is eligible to become a member of the Codidact board is also eligible for election to the Panel.
ARTICLE 3
Nobody who has been suspended within the last year and has not successfully appealed that suspension shall be eligible for membership on the Panel.
ARTICLE 4
After every election, the Panel elects one member as chairperson.
TITLE 2
GENERAL RULES OF PROCEDURE
ARTICLE 5
The Panel will assign one member as a reporter to the case, who shall investigate it and submit a report with recommendations to the Panel. The reporter will be temporarily granted admin rights, if necessary, on the site or sites that the question relates to.
ARTICLE 6
The Panel will hear all involved parties. They shall be kept regularly up to date about the state of the proceedings. Private means of communication shall be established between the Panel and any party.
TITLE 3
APPEALS
ARTICLE 7
The panel decides on appeals against moderator actions, including those by the Codidact team.
ARTICLE 8
Anyone who has been affected by a moderator action can, as a last resort, appeal to the panel to claim that it was illegitimate, malicious or unwarranted. This must be explained with arguments.
ARTICLE 9
If the appeal is obviously unreasonable, the reporter can suggest to reject it summarily. It is rejected summarily, if at least one other panel member agrees and no member objects within 7 days.
ARTICLE 10
In other cases, the panel will try the appeal based on the report and on questions asked to all involved parties and on facts found in activity logs. If the appeal is found to be valid, the moderator action in question is reversed.
TITLE 4
MODERATOR REVIEW
ARTICLE 11
The panel is solely responsible for reviewing moderator conduct for possible violation of Codidact’s rules and deciding whether the moderator shall be removed from office for such violations.
ARTICLE 12
Moderator Review Proceedings can be initiated by the Codidact team (for example based on user complaints) or any fellow moderator on the site concerned. Efforts should be made to resolve differences directly before invoking this process.
ARTICLE 13
In moderator review proceedings, the Panel has no authority to remove the moderator status of members of the Codidact team, but it can escalate complaints and it can disallow members to use moderator powers outside of their official Codidact duties.
ARTICLE 14
The panel can decide, on the suggestion of the reporter, that the moderator status of the moderator under question shall be temporarily revoked during the proceedings.
ARTICLE 15
The moderator under review has the right to respond to all accusations and to be heard by the panel before any negative decision.
ARTICLE 16
Based on the report, the statements by the initiators of the proceeding and the moderator under review, and on recent activity logs and other evidence, the panel will decide whether the moderator violated the Codidact rules or not. Decisions against the moderator require a majority of ⅔ of the panel.
ARTICLE 17
In making decisions on moderator review cases, the Panel shall have the option to (a) absolve the moderator of wrongdoing; (b) acknowledge wrongdoing but issue no penalty; (c) acknowledge wrongdoing and issue a formal warning; or (d) acknowledge wrongdoing and remove the moderator from office on the site that the case pertains to. In all cases a permanent note shall be made on the moderator’s account that a moderator review was conducted and what its outcome was. In cases of egregious violations of the rules, the panel can, by ⅔ majority, decide that the user is ineligible to be elected or appointed moderator anywhere in the Codidact network, in which case the moderator shall be removed from all moderator positions.
ARTICLE 17.1
If the Panel elects to acknowledge wrongdoing, then before deciding on penalties, the Panel checks the moderator's record for previous reviews and their outcomes. The Panel should take previous warnings into account when deciding the outcome of a review..
ARTICLE 18
The panel has the sole power to remove moderators for Codidact rule violations. In emergency situations the Codidact team can temporarily remove or suspend a moderator, but they need to initiate a proceeding and move a panel decision for removal and continuing the temporary removal within two working days. In cases of legal obligations or other exceptional circumstances dictating that a moderator be removed, the Codidact team can remove the status, but must explain their reasons to the moderator in question and offer the moderator the chance to step down voluntarily. If the moderator does not choose to step down, the reasons for the removal must also be shared with the panel.
TITLE 5
OTHER QUESTIONS
ARTICLE 19
The panel is also responsible for disputes between moderators and for the review of moderator selections on complaints against their validity.
ARTICLE 20
The panel decides based on the report and the statements of all involved parties.
TITLE 6
DECISIONS OF THE PANEL
ARTICLE 21
The decisions of the panel are sent to all involved parties. Those which are not summary rejections are published on a Codidact website with personal data redacted. Lists of summary rejections shall be published for transparency purposes (possibly aggregated).
ARTICLE 21.1
The Panel shall preserve records and evidence of prior proceedings. It may use them in future cases if applicable.
ARTICLE 22
Panel decisions are binding to every community member, to the moderators and the Codidact team, except for cases where the Codidact team determines that it cannot follow the judgment for legal reasons or because the panel decision is obviously outside of its authority (ultra vires). If it does so, it must submit its reasons to the panel, which may publish it with personal or private information redacted.
ARTICLE 23
For every decision, the panel shall give an explanation of the reasons for it. If deemed necessary, it can give a short summary, which can be used as guidance for future disputes.
ARTICLE 24
All questions about the proceedings of the panel that are not determined by this document can be decided by the panel itself.
ARTICLE 25
All panel decisions are made by majority vote, unless otherwise noted in this statute.
TITLE 7
IMPARTIALITY
ARTICLE 26
Members of the panel who feel that they cannot act impartially in a specific case shall recuse themselves. A member who has initiated the proceeding or who is under review is automatically recused.
ARTICLE 27
Any involved party may move to recuse any member of the panel who they think is not impartial enough to guarantee a fair trial.
ARTICLE 28
The panel, without the rejected member, decides whether the motion is reasonable. If it is, the member is recused.
ARTICLE 29
Every recused member is replaced by a replacement chosen randomly from a set of eligible users.
ARTICLE 30
Eligible as replacement are: (1) all moderators of unaffected sites and (2) users eligible to be elected as Panel members (per Articles 2 and 3) who have signed up on an annual list for possible replacements.
TITLE 8
OTHER PROVISIONS
ARTICLE 31
This document may be changed by the Codidact team, after 14 days’ notice has been given and discussions with the community about the merit of the change have been held. Changes only apply to future proceedings and are not retroactive.
ARTICLE 32
The Panel has no authority to bind Codidact, moderators, or users, except as otherwise noted in this document.
So please read through that update and give some feedback. Please try to use one answer per point instead of slamming everything in one huge post, because that makes replying and voting much easier.
> ARTICLE 4 > > After every election, the Panel elects one member as chairperson. I fail to find any other referen …
4y ago
> ARTICLE 18 > > The panel has the sole power to remove moderators for Codidact rule violations. In emergency situati …
4y ago
Does the Panel's jurisdiction extend to chat? Over on the discord server, the topic of chatroom moderation came up. I …
4y ago
A few things re. conducting Panel business: 1. I propose codifying the number required for quorum, with "quorum" in t …
4y ago
A thought not really on the content, but on the structure: It might be good to have some way to easily insert new Articl …
4y ago
What will happen if there are not enough persons to reach the desired size of seven persons? I propose the following cha …
4y ago
I propose that we need a clause governing the criteria and process for removing a panel member in the very rare case tha …
4y ago
7 answers
ARTICLE 4
After every election, the Panel elects one member as chairperson.
I fail to find any other reference to the role of chairperson in the proposal. Especially considering that a "reporter" is assigned separately for each case, for what purpose is a chairperson elected among the members of the panel? Is this necessary?
In response to luap42's response comment that:
The purpose of the chairperson is to lead the "meetings" of the Panel / to organize it's work. It might also choose the reporter (or decide, how it is chosen), but that's within the self-organization.
I propose that this should be changed to say that the Panel itself determines its internal organization or something to that effect. Don't impose any particular internal organization on the Panel unless it's actually necessary, especially by mandating that a specific role exists without defining at least its minimal responsibilities.
If the Panel's "meetings" become so disorganized that it's not possible to hold them productively, you'd hope that enough people on the Panel would be reasonable enough to say "hey, we really need to have someone who can maintain order among us, because we obviously can't do that collectively, so let's pause this and appoint one of us for that job".
ARTICLE 18
The panel has the sole power to remove moderators for Codidact rule violations. In emergency situations the Codidact team can temporarily remove or suspend a moderator, but they need to initiate a proceeding and move a panel decision for removal and continuing the temporary removal within two working days. In cases of legal obligations or other exceptional circumstances dictating that a moderator be removed, the Codidact team can remove the status, but must explain their reasons to the moderator in question and offer the moderator the chance to step down voluntarily. If the moderator does not choose to step down, the reasons for the removal must also be shared with the panel.
This appears to be self-contradictory.
It starts out by saying "The panel has the sole power to remove moderators for Codidact rule violations", which I interpret to mean that no other entity has this power. (The alternative interpretation would be that it only has the power to remove moderators, which would be at odds with what's stated elsewhere in the text.) It then goes on to say that "In cases of legal obligations or other exceptional circumstances" (the latter being undefined), the Codidact team can remove a moderator's status.
I do kind of understand what that second half is getting at. At the same time, I'm sorry, but you simply can't have it both ways. Either the Arbitration & Review Panel is the only entity who has the power to remove a moderator against that moderator's wish, or they aren't.
I would suggest instead that this should say (and I don't have a ready suggestion for exactly how to phrase it) that other than at the specific, explicit request of the moderator in question, there are two groups of people who can remove a moderator's status, namely on the one hand the Arbitration & Review Panel in response to a review initiated otherwise as described elsewhere in the text, and on the other hand the Codidact Team, but if the Codidact Team removes a moderator's status, that removal must be brought to the Arbitration & Review Panel within some specified, reasonable, short amount of time, and the Panel actually has the authority to overrule the Team and reinstate the moderator if they find the reasons for the removal to be lacking, much the same as how they could decide to not remove the moderator in the first place had the same complaint come from the community.
That would make any moderator removal by the Codidact Team a strictly temporary measure, which automatically initiates a proper review with the aim of making a more permanent decision.
If the Codidact Team does its homework, it seems likely that any such decision made by the Panel would be the same as the one initially reached by Codidact Team, but this would protect against the Codidact Team somehow going rogue or, alternatively, simply having an agenda or vendetta against a particular moderator, and looking for some "exceptional circumstance" to use to justify removal without oversight.
I truly hope that such a provision will never be needed, but this seems to me like exactly the kind of provision that if it's needed at any point, it needs to be one that gives the Panel some real teeth against the Codidact Team.
A few things re. conducting Panel business:
-
I propose codifying the number required for quorum, with "quorum" in this case meaning the number of Panel members required to be present in order to conduct business.
a. Do quorum rules apply to offline/asynchronous votes (such as in a Codidact post), or only to live meetings of the Panel?
-
The two "⅔" rules are worded slightly differently and could therefore be interpreted differently. Is that intended?
a. Article 16 could imply the entire Panel must vote, not just a quorum if present.
b. Article 17 could imply only a quorum is needed to vote.
Does the Panel's jurisdiction extend to chat?
Over on the discord server, the topic of chatroom moderation came up. If a chatroom mod does something that one could consider an abuse of power or generally incorrect, is the Panel allowed to step in?
Keep in mind that although the site mods and the chatroom mods are currently the same, they do not have to be, and might not be in the future.
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What will happen if there are not enough persons to reach the desired size of seven persons? I propose the following change (additions in bold):
The Panel consists of at most 7 members of the Codidact network, who are elected for two-year terms in the same manner as the community board positions. Each year the community elects enough members to bring the panel to at most 7. In the first election, the three members with the lowest vote scores shall be elected for one-year terms only. Members may be elected again for one additional consecutive term, after which they are ineligible to serve again for a period of one term.
This way the panel can still continue with its work even though it might not be at full capacity. Maybe there should be an addition that the panel needs at least two people (because a panel with one person isn't really a panel).
(You might think that seven people can be easily recruited but looking at SE's moderator elections and other personal experiences, I know that such things fluctuate pretty much all the time - sometimes there are way too many candidates, sometimes there aren't enough.)
A thought not really on the content, but on the structure: It might be good to have some way to easily insert new Articles, within Titles, without needing contortions like calling something Article 25AA½ or whatever to try to get items within an existing Title.
Usual ways I've seen for this in documents is:
- Number everything in a "structure" like Title 1 consists of Article 1-1 through 1-4, and then Title 2 consists of Article 2-1 through 2-2, and so on. This means that it's easy to find which Title an Article is in given its number, and it's easy to add articles (at least if being added at the end of a given Title). Sometimes it's a little awkward to sort through since it's not just a straight number, though.
- Leave gaps in the numbering, where Title 1 consists of Articles 101 through 104, and Title 2 consists of 201 and 202. Or, if you want to allow for inserting elsewhere between articles, even have gaps between Articles like numbering Title 1 as Articles 1010, 1020, 1030, & 1040 or the like. This can be a bit awkward since there are gaps everywhere, though.
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