Carbon Language community transparency report through 2025-03-31

[CelineausBerlin]

The Carbon community works to be welcoming and kind among itself and to others,
with a deep commitment to psychological safety, and we want to ensure that
doesn’t change as we grow and evolve. To that end, we have a few ground rules
that we ask all community members to adhere to:

• be welcoming,
• be friendly and patient,
• be considerate,
• be kind,
• be careful in the words that we choose,
• when we disagree, try to understand why, and
• recognize when progress has stopped, and take a step back.

The following summary is intended to help the community understand what kinds of
Code of Conduct incidents were brought to our attention lately, and how we
dealt with them.

Publishing such transparency reports on a regular basis is helping us track
progress and hold ourselves accountable to high standards of community culture.

Summary

Collaboration in our community spaces was quite smooth in the first quarter of
2025, with hardly any need for active moderation. Exchanges have remained
on-topic, constructive and friendly in the last months.
Our crowd size seemed to be stabilizing on Discord (with 4,910 members then)
while 5 new people started actively contributing to the project on GitHub.
This means we had reached 167 contributors on GitHub when this report was
published.
As mentioned previously, if we were to keep on track with our roadmap, and
reach our Carbon 1.0 milestone, we would expect many more people to join us
this year.
We are looking forward to keeping growing our community in this healthy way!

To help with moderation and potential conduct issues, we have 11 trained people
to count on, including our community lead who serves as their guide, trainer and
coach.
Our moderation and conduct team members are contributing from 3 different
continents.

Our AutoMod bots are helping us on Discord, automatically catching the use of
some harmful language and spam. The idea is to be able to focus on the
educational and conversational part of our moderation role, and automate what
does not need a human to be taken adequate care of. Indeed, some things are
best taken care of by our bots, and some by us, humans. So, we are keeping in
check what the right balance between automated and manual moderation is, and
are making adjustments on the way when appropriate.

Please note that some incidents may have escaped our attention. You can help us
keep our spaces welcoming and fostering a spirit of collaboration, and report
any situation that may require our intervention:
https://github.com/carbon-language/carbon-lang/blob/trunk/CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md

Our interventions from 2025-01-01 through 2025-03-31

In Q1 2025, our AutoMod bots caught and blocked a single post containing harmful
language. That account promptly disappeared from Discord afterwards.

There was also a couple of content-free and noise comments on GitHub which were
hidden.

On GitHub, one bot also posted spam, and was reported by members, so all further
comments from that account were hidden.

It was yet unclear how LLMs and other bots interacting with our repo directly
would impact our moderation work in the near future, but so far we had no bigger
concerns.

Besides, we revoked moderation access of an inactive account which was not
supposed to have them.

And so, with hardly any moderation action visible to the community, we decided
to post a reminder, for contributors old and new, about what our moderation
team could help with and how to report issues deemed worth looking into on
Discord.

Closing observations

Our community is keeping up with a healthy, organic growth pace, and a friendly
and constructive contribution culture.
Let’s keep it up in the coming months and beyond!

We’ll keep watching and providing support when needed, and are hoping for more
contributions from new members, while keeping it friendly and kind at all times.

Thank you all for your contributions, and see you around!

The Carbon Code of Conduct team, 2025-04-09