Over the last couple of years, I’ve been trying to skill up a lot at resolving community complaints.  This is a really irritating field to get good at. When I want to get better at writing code, I can sit down and write more code more or less whenever I feel like it. When I want to get better at guitar, I can sit down with my guitar and practice that D to D7 transition. For complaint resolution, even finding people to roleplay the skill with takes a little setup, and that’s a lot less like the real thing than you can get with code or guitar. For real complaints, they come in uneven batches, and worst, you seldom get confirmation if you did it successfully. So, like any good Aspiring Ravenclaw Rationalist, I read a lot of essays about conflict.

Taking a Safety Report, Taking Someone Aside, and Outcomes of a Safety Report provide a useful frame and better still useful steps and considerations on what to do when someone comes to you with a concern about an attendee. I keep being tempted to rewrite these in a numbered list, but that’s a stylistic preference. While the topic is very different, I found A Better Way To Ask for An Apology to be similarly easier to turn into concrete steps, and it feels like it has a useful overlap with the previous three. To have a good apology, you need to be specific. If you take only one sentence away from this links post, I want it to be “It is also important to clearly distinguish between things you've observed, things you've heard secondhand, and your interpretations of your observations.”

When to Ban Someone is a discussion of the decision to ban people from events. It has a fairly specific stance on where these decisions should come from, but wears that on its sleeve in a way I appreciate. Decentralized Exclusion goes over the situation of distributed communities banning people, even without formal structures. I like the way it looks at the constraints of such communities, but I’m not sure how I feel about the reliance on singular public statements. It puts a lot of onus on that statement to get things right, and it isn’t clear to me how a true statement works better than a false statement. (See Guided By The Beauty Of Our Weapons- a big statement is asymmetric, but not very asymmetric.) They're both a bit prescriptive though (When to Ban moreso than Decentralized Exclusion) whereas Whisper Networks, Callout Posts, and Expulsion: Three Imprefect Ways Of Dealing With Abuse on the other hand feels more descriptive to me. One way bans and exclusion statements are often written is by a panel; I'm a little more bullish on panels than most people I talked to with more experience than I have, but given that my predecessor's writeup on the subject is titled The Impossible Problem of Due Process you should not take that as my ringing endorsement of the strategy. 

Concerns with Intentional Insights, Details behind the InIn Document, and Setting Community Norms and Values: A Response to the InIn Document provide a useful three-beat case study of one such exclusion. The Details post is the most unusual, and while there aren’t as many details I appreciate laying out how much work goes into doing this and how it points out that the subject had a couple of opportunities to comment.

There’s also Safety Committee Resources, which is itself a linkspost. The gold mine here for me is the 12 Months of Cases part of The EA Community Health Team’s Work, Tales of a Dance Monarch, and Tales From the Front Line of Ombuds Work. I appreciate these for giving a sense of what comes up and what a ‘normal’ tour as a point person for community safety work is like. While I’m sharing case studies, Takes From Staff At Orgs With Leadership That Went Off The Rails is vaguer and more about formal organizations, but I liked having that perspective in my head too.

Run Posts By Orgs, and Productive Criticism: Running a Draft Past The People You're Criticizing are also written for more formal setups than your average community contact is going to have to deal with. I think it’s useful to import that norm back down to things event organizers do run into. If someone brings a concern or complaint to you about someone else, and wants you to act on it, then you should talk to the subject. The emphatic version of that is On Justice in the Ratsphere.

The person who takes safety reports and who holds the main responsibility is sometimes called a Safety Contact or Community Contact. CEA has a short writeup on what that’s like (EA Groups Resources: Community Contacts) but I also like A Contact Person for the EA Community and BIDA’s Safety Team’s How We Can Help. Most important on both the last two links is that they set the scope of what they do, which if you aren’t careful can balloon very easily into much more than anyone can handle. The coda here is My Life Would Be Much Harder Without The Community Health Team. I Think Yours Might Too. If you remember two sentences from this links post, I want the second sentence to be “And basically no one knows about any of those times they do things well, because why would they?”

I have more in mind to say about conflict, from direct experiences, interviews with people who are good at it, some books I've read, and some armchair theorizing, but this seemed a decent starting place.