I’m consolidating our reply to all the questions asked above here as many of the same questions were asked a few times.
What is the motivation behind the participation rules?
There are three main things driving the participation rule changes:
- The LLVM Project has never had any official written policy related to the participation of minors. Given that the LLVM Foundation offers educational programs and events, and we know that many younger individuals are programming at earlier ages, we want to allow minors to participate in all aspects of our community in a safe way. Setting expectations about the participation of minors in our community is an important part of that. We already have this requirement indirectly through using a GitHub account to access many parts of our project and also in the Discord terms of service.
- Given that we have minors participating in our community, we want to provide a safe community and protect minors as much as possible by restricting who can access our community.
- We want our community to be a safe place for all individuals in terms of psychological, emotional, and physical safety.
Has this been done in other code of conducts or terms of service before? Other communities?
We have not seen participation rules in a code of conduct but see them associated with the service terms or event rules.
There are many examples of organizations and online services that state they are for ages 13+, and some allow younger participants with parental or legal guardian supervision. For example: GitHub and Discord.
Regarding the sex offender policy, Facebook currently has this restriction in their terms of service.
I started to code at age 9, can people under the age of 13 participate?
We are hoping to allow participants under the age 13 to participate with parental or legal guardian supervision. This is pending legal review as there are specific legal requirements related to minors and privacy.
Do you plan to do background checks on all individuals of the project?
No.
Do you plan to check IDs on all individuals of the project?
No, we do not plan to check identification for online participation.
What about checking ID at all events?
We have not in the past, but we may begin checking identification for LLVM Foundation in person events, as this is common for conferences to check identification for legal and liability reasons (especially when serving alcohol).
Some additional questions that were brought up that we find are all related:
- Why limit this to just sex registry versus all felonies?
- How do you handle different countries (and states) and their laws regarding the sexual registry list and what is legal?
- What about the underlying problem with sex registry lists?
- What about prisoners currently serving time who are intending to reform through coding?
- What about individuals that got put on a sex registry list for something that most would not find aggregious (ie. public urination)?
We want to implement a policy that achieves the 3 main goals as outlined above. We have consulted legal counsel and are aware of the differences and imperfections of using the sex registry list when participants are from different states and countries.
Taking into consideration the feedback and concerns you have iterated, we will continue discussion with legal counsel on the best wording of this policy and if it should be expanded to include additional types of crimes (i.e. hate crimes). However, the resulting policy should still achieve the 3 goals outlined above. We will provide updates when we have them.
While this new policy could hypothetically exclude some new individuals from participating in the LLVM project, our current lack of participation policies are already impacting individuals who are currently involved in the project.
Will contributors who just send a patch be under the same participation rules?
Submitting a patch or code contribution is not done in isolation and involves back and forth dialogue between individuals during the review process. For some members of our community, this impacts their feelings of safety within our community.
We also have roles of leadership in our community such as code owners or “experienced reviewers’’ that would not be appropriate to have individuals who have committed sexual or gender based violent crimes. This starts to create a psychologically unsafe environment and an unwanted power dynamic for some members of our community and discourages their contributions to the project.
We feel that it would be good to revisit the topic of code contributions once we have a more finalized wording for the participation rules.