Carbon Language community transparency report through 2025-06-30

[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 peaceful in the second quarter of 2025 again.
That means: there was almost no situation where our moderation team needed to intervene as such. Good job everyone!
We had a fairly stable crowd size on Discord (with 4,857 members), and on GitHub we had 168 contributors when this report was published.
As we kept working towards 0.1 (next year, hopefully!), we clarified that some situations are best handled by other people than the conduct team, and we discussed under which conditions a conduct team member should probably take a step back from their duties. We also consolidated the necessity for enough conduct team members to chime in before making decisions and acting on them.

To help with moderation and potential conduct issues, we could count on 11 trained people, including our community lead, whose role is guiding, training and coaching the team.
Our moderation and conduct team members are located in 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 2025-04-01 through 2025-06-30

In Q2 2025, our AutoMod bots caught and blocked a single post containing harmful language. The user got the message and found a more mindful wording for their message.

There was no moderation “intervention” per se on Discord otherwise.

On GitHub, we had some spam, and some seemingly LLM-generated unhelpful comments:

• The user account posting those unhelpful comments was blocked from making more comments.
• The spam was hidden (comments) or reverted (project wiki edits). Some of these spamming accounts were reported to GitHub as well.

It was also pointed out that what looks like a robotic contribution could have been posted, in reality, by someone whose native language is not English and who is using LLMs to help them contribute, since we use English to communicate throughout the project. So we want to be mindful of that in the future.

Finally, a user was banned due to disruptive activity in our GitHub repository.

In the conduct team, we had a conversation about our code of conduct framework, since we noticed that we were drifting away from it. And so, we decided to stick to its original scope, we talked about conditions under which a member should step back from their duties, and we decided to stick to our original voting mechanism as well.

Closing observations

Our community seems to be stabilizing in size and working pace, and is modelling a constructive contribution culture at this point.
And we are looking forward to welcoming more people on board for this journey. 🙂

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, 2025-07-20