🤚Moderation Policy

This page explains the moderation guidelines for the subscribed membership activities.

This policy applies to all subscribed membership activity including but not limited to Open Podcasts, Open Research Portals, community discussion forums on Slack, Discord, Discourse, project mailing lists or Open Constitution Member Console.

Community Ambassadors moderate the public channel messages for Code violations and help channelise the public conversations.

Our community is growing vertically, and therefore at times, moderators may or may not provide grounds for an action of deletion(Deletion for moderation).

In the case of deletion of public messages, the moderation group should delete messages which:

1. Disclose NPPI: Non-public personal information e.g. photos, personal information of a member, a government-issued identifier and the like, unless a member expressly waives the right to privacy.

2. If a member incidentally(not once but through a span of time) violates the Guiding Principles and the Code of Conduct.

The Foundation's community advocates that - "We shall build tolerance in our community." When a member's expressions violate the Guiding principles or the Code of Conduct, Open Constitution's Moderation bots are activated by default. The Foundation's communications system also has privacy drivers to ensure member safety. A single message should not be construed as a member's violation of community guidelines. Rather habitually should be seen as a measure for Code violations.

Therefore, moderators should look for a continuous period of time(a minimum of 7 days) to establish whether a member violated the community code or not.

Read more about Sentient Bot, which runs a moderation sweep every week.

3. When a member has requested deletion of their expressions and the Media Committee has reviewed the request.

For many reasons such as communication between sparring members on a topic of interest, member wishing to take back their expressions, members may seek deletion of their public expressions. If the Media Committee has reviewed the request in the affirmative, expressions may get deleted.

Open Constitution has automated privacy drivers such as Message Retention triggers on its communication systems. Members use the default safe settings in private messages and change or modify them based on peer consent.

For public forums, Media CWCs receive the deletion requests and review them each week.

About Channel Moderators/Ambassadors:

Generally, each public channel has a Moderator/Ambassador who politely flags any violation of the Foundation's code of conduct.

Each moderation follows an escalation, which you can also read about in the Code of Conduct.

Who are the Moderators? They can be Media Committee members, Media CWC members, or Steering and CWC members of other committees of the Foundation.

Approach to Escalation:

Step 1: Community Ambassadors/Moderators: In a scenario, where a member has noticed a violation of these guidelines, they shall bring it to the notice of the public channel’s moderator with the message: Notice and serial number of the Code.

E.g. Notice 11 with a tag to the moderator of the public channel or private channels.

For reporting violations in a Direct Message, it is recommended to write to the Media Council, rather than confronting your peer with a Notice of violation. 😒

Step 2: Media Council: In case the moderator of the channel is unable to respond appropriately to a member’s satisfaction, members are encouraged to contact the Media Council on its mailing list.

Step 3: Observation Council: If the Media Council is unable to address the violation to the member’s satisfaction, member(s) may reach the Foundation’s Observation Council which plays the role of arbitration in dispute resolution between members.

Moderation of a live conversation:

Live conversation is a real-time conversation on the Foundation's communication systems when two peers are expressing their views and statements.

Open Council and its committee members(CWC: Core Working Groups/Committees) should only moderate an ongoing live conversation.

Further, It is at the discretion of the Independent Board members to stop/interrupt a live public conversation w.r.t subscribed membership activity.

Further, read about "Sentient Bot", an AI anonymous communication system on Open Constitution's decentralised citizen network.