Community Blog Guidelines

Generally sounds good to me and helpful to have these sort of guidelines in place.

I think this sentence could be improved though:

Trolling: "Trolling" is a complex term, but we know what trolls are and we won’t tolerate it.

This sounds like we are saying 'we know what it means but we won't tell you'. I think we should be clearer about what it is so that we can fairly act on something that we consider to be 'trolling'.

Thanks for your comment William. How about something like "Trolls are people who leave intentionally provocative or offensive messages on the internet in order to get attention, cause trouble or upset someone and won’t be tolerated."

That sounds much clearer.

I think you could just drop "provocative" and leave "offensive" by itself. Someone might leave provocative messages to get attention, and in many cases that should be encouraged. You could also add a separate item about keeping threads on-topic and not interfering with others' ability to have dialog.

Much looks good.

How much of the Content Moderation policy isn't covered already by the Code of Conduct? It feels like there's a lot of overlap - so could this be shortened to 'in addition to following our community code of conduct… you should XYZ' and only include that which is unique? and so encourage people to re-read the code of conduct while they're at it? Disinfo, doxxing, and spam stand out as unique - some others sound like a rephrasing of what's already covered in the CoC meaning the same idea is defined in two places, with potentially subtle differences. In general given English is the second+ language to many in the community - making it shorter is probably good too?

This includes taking a thread off-topic.

I sometimes take threads off-topic, I didn't realise that was trolling, am not sure that's how I'd define that... it's just how my brain works. This makes me wonder if 'neurodiversity' needs mentioning in the list of "welcoming for all regardless of…".

Final point - I was once shamed on Twitter by an academic as being ableist for using 'crazy' pejoratively (I said "if Trump gets elected that would round out this crazy year"). The experience left me identifying with those who 'get language wrong'. So for me the principle of inclusivity has to include helping people who 'get language wrong' recognising all the class- and education- based associations around being confident and precise with language, especially given its use is regularly evolving (and much of the Civi community are using English as a second language). So rather than shaming, othering, cancelling, etc them - trying to help them understand the problem and adapt (unless they really are being deliberately toxic or unpleasant). Not sure how you work that into the policy, but as using language based on one's own cultural experience of language is also part of the cultural difference we are being asked to respect perhaps it's just that breach of these guidelines should be handled with a presumption of good intent / lack of awareness, until proven otherwise.

I think there's a valid point about potentially duplicating the CoC that we can look at here Nic, the taking a thread off-topic I agree - needs rewording I'd suggest:

This includes intentionally derailing a thread by hijacking it's original purpose or direction

I think adding neurodiversity to the "welcoming for all" section is a good idea.

I also like the idea of stating that "enforcement" of the policy for lack of a better word is most definitely intended to be about encouraging compliance through education and assistance (move towards compliance with the guidelines) rather than removing posts or "punitive" actions. 100% behind presuming good intent and lack of awareness initially.

That sounds good, thanks.

One of the elements I highly value about this community is the high level of conversation that takes place here. Thanks to the Community Council for putting the initial draft together -- it gets things right. And further thanks to Nicole and Mikey for proposing / accepting refinements to this initial draft in a spirit of cooperation and good well, focused on obtaining the best possible results.

Thanks Nic. I really like you comment about encouraging education and open discussion about language. I'll take this back to our next Council discussion and see how we can incorporate that.

Fully agreed that we should strip out everything covered by our CoC. I actually have a hard time parsing what's actually new, which makes me unable to provide meaningful feedback.

We should be open to updating our CoC if some of the points raised here reveal the need!

Thanks again for putting this together. One thing that I personally feel unclear on is what the central purpose of the blog actually is. This document provides a list of "don't's", but it doesn't clearly establish what the blog is intended for, who it's intended for, etc. Maybe that's a big ask or maybe there's no clear answer, however I feel myself wanting to understand than first and foremost.

I do also understand the reasons for the policy coming about now, however there remain some grey areas for me that may cause confusion or be exploited. For example, the idea of not redirecting out to a different resource (eg., site) "if the primary result is to build clientele or sell a service" will likely be tough to enforce and be problematic. There are certainly many examples where posts were made "for the good of the community", though there was most certainly an underlying motive to drive business.

This seems difficult to me as well because there may be future endeavors that sorta do both. For example, hypothetically speaking, suppose the Core Team itself decided to launch a new service that was nowhere to be found in the market AND that was consistent with our goal of growing the overall userbase. Could we promote it on the blog and drive potential users to a different site for sign up? Another good example would be events. We allow offsite registration (previously we discouraged it) and for partners to take payments/manage event revenues. It's conceivable that such events could primarily be movtivated by profit. Is that bad?

Finally, and still somewhat on this same point, I worry that initiatives like the partner listing, which is absolutely intended to promote and drive business, either could come under fire or (similar intiatives) could cause conflict in the future.

Clearly, I'm not offering a solution here, but I would like to circle my questions back to the original point about the purpose of the blog. Is it to market and promote CiviCRM? Is it a channel through which community members can promote themselves, their work, etc. (tactfully)? It is a channel where new services, extensions, products, etc. can be introduced? Or is it more specifically intended to be a public community discussion board about the (existing) product that introduces and shares information about current developments, case studies, and initiatives (specific to the product and without any intent to sell a product, service, extension, etc.)

We discussed, at some length, the balance between community benefit and commercial benefit - we accept that we can't remove the latter entirely, what we're clear and unanimous on is that it cannot ever be the primary motivation or goal of a blog post on CiviCRM.org. The content as published should have a clear tangible benefit to the community or if it is 'purely advertising' be advertising an event or service which benefits the community at large rather than a single provider.

Event signups are an area we didn't discuss, and the guidelines are probably going to need to account for those - such as requiring that any post containing an event registration link complies with GDPR or other local legislation (though that would rule out CiviCRM.org being used for event registration.)

These guidelines relate solely to the blog - I could see them being applied to the partner listing by someone but we're clear that they are blog guidelines, and the partner listing is a tinderbox anyway - someone is always going to be unhappy about it.

Thanks again for putting this together. One thing that I personally feel unclear on is what the central purpose of the blog actually is. This document provides a list of "don't's", but it doesn't clearly establish what the blog is intended for, who it's intended for, etc. Maybe that's a big ask or maybe there's no clear answer, however I feel myself wanting to understand than first and foremost.

This feels like trying to close the stable door after the horse has bolted. We touched on this and landed on the blog being for community benefit - some commercial benefit is going to happen but posts to the blog and comments should not be purely about advertising a single provider - use of the blog to share extensions, events, tutorials is all fantastic - but the actual content posted to CiviCRM.org itself should be able to stand alone without the links and provide benefit to the community if the link was removed.

This seems difficult to me as well because there may be future endeavors that sorta do both. For example, hypothetically speaking, suppose the Core Team itself decided to launch a new service that was nowhere to be found in the market AND that was consistent with our goal of growing the overall userbase. Could we promote it on the blog and drive potential users to a different site for sign up? Another good example would be events. We allow offsite registration (previously we discouraged it) and for partners to take payments/manage event revenues. It's conceivable that such events could primarily be movtivated by profit. Is that bad?

We would expect to hold the Core Team to the same standard as anyone else with the somewhat obvious caveat that realistically everything the Core Team does should benefit the community-at-large. Specifically though it would depend on how the blog post was written and if it was useful without the signup link. The Core Team has recognised a need to split the commercial (Spark, presently) from the Community - we'd probably be expecting any "commercial" Core Team activity to take place on the new commercial domain and not the community domain.

Circling back to your original question about the purpose of the blog - I would summarise as community benefit-driven knowledge sharing and marketing. Others, however, may disagree :-)

Josh raises a good point - I was curious recently if there were guidelines about what could and couldn't be put on the blog as I wanted to post something which, while not promoting a commercial service, was discusing a Civi extension that isn't commissioned by a non-profit, and isn't something universal like Form Processor or a theme. It was suggested to me that's ok - but it would be good to have that defined more clearly in some guidelines. ie are there any Civi extensions or events that it wouldn't be ok to blog about?

Perhaps related, right now the top article on the blog is "8 Ways to Make Your Website and Member Portal More Accessible" - https://civicrm.org/blog/farhadkhan/8-ways-make-your-website-and-member-portal-more-accessible which doesn't mention CiviCRM and 6 of the 8 ways are on an external website. This makes it feel like SEO marketing content - which of course it may well not be. Farhad Khan currently publishes about one article a week on the blog - in the last month there's also been:

"Data Migration Success: Data with a Purpose"
"Top 8 User Journey Questions Answered for Associations"
"5 Reasons to Build a Customized Member Portal" Khan's articles make up 4 out of the 10 articles on the /blog first page - which is maybe manageable. But with a couple more bloggers like that, it could feel like an SEO aggregation site - and mean the important community notices gets lost.

I don't think, generally that there are any extensions/events that it wouldn't be okay to blog about assuming the post and the extension/event respect the Code of Conduct.

The posts you highlight are definitely relevant to this discussion and they helped highlight the need for blog content guidelines.

Just adding my support to Mikey's well worded reply! Thanks Mikey. I think you captured our conversation really well.

Echoing some of Nic's comment above, this seems to be mostly a restatement and expansion of the Code of Conduct. If we need this further clarification then why is this specifically targetted at the blog which is one of our lesser used channels? And if this is about the blog, this sentence is off-topic: "Here are ways we can encourage healthy communications on all CiviCRM platforms (blogs, mattermost, etc.) including in-person and virtual meeting"

Rather than have yet another document setting out what people should and shouldn't do, I'd prefer to see these general communication expectations merged into the existing Code of Conduct and Community Guidelines.

From the title I was expecting something particular to the blog. Once we address Josh's comments about what we want the blog to be then a few specific guidelines about blog content may be appropriate.

You're entirely right here - there are definitely parts of this that we can and should merge into the code of conduct.

Thanks to all for putting thought and time into this. I agree with merging non-duplicate bits into the code of conduct.

I feel like there's enough in there to justify removing pretty much anyone or anything! The balance feels stacked against contributions (e.g. Nicol's already had doubts about the type of allowed content); perhaps something about the purpose of the blog, as others have suggested, and in a really positive way might help redress this.

I think it could be clearer about who will be doing the moderation/removing/blocking etc. The council is suggested as a body to receive complaints, perhaps it's the council that are the mods? This could be clearer.

I'm trying to think how this might have helped in my experience of upsetting people :-). There was a blog post about some super new feature that was funded by a US political party, which - in my personal opinion - does some pretty dodgy stuff. I added a comment saying thanks for the contribution which will be of general use, but also strongly expressing my opinion that CiviCRM ought not to be associated with the political organisation that was being thanked in the post and whose cause was being furthered by its use of CiviCRM. Various technical oopsies happened too which hindered any sort of constructive discussion or engagement, and to cut a painful episode short, the blog comments were pulled. I have reflected lots on this as I'm sure others have, and I would take a different approach next time.

I guess, I would be encouraged by the above to ask questions and assume the best? Comfort over challenge? I did think about this before, but I decided that my comment was about the politcal org, not about the blogger, and I made reference to the party's own publicly stated aims as a way to try to avoid the blogger feeling like I was having a go at them. I might have asked: gun homicides have jumped massively in the last few years and gun suicide is also at an all time high, why is it ok to be working for less gun control? Or something about innequality. But I think all of that falls foul of possibly interfering with someone feeling comfortable. Maybe with the above instead I would shop them to the community council: "hey, I feel that this blog post is promoting a political party, isn't that against the rules?".

I personally struggle with the "right to be comfortable". An awareness of difference brings with it an awareness of the reality that many are definitely not comfortable, while some feel entitled to it. e.g. a white person can avoid being overtly racist, which might feel comfortable to them, but it's hard and often uncomfortable work to be anti-racist, yet that's the work that's needed to make things better.

I'd love CiviCRM to be part of making the world better for all (as opposed to just making it go faster - after all, we are headed for a cliff). I realise that we all have our own views on how to do that; we don't all agree and that can be a good thing if we listen and consider and debate etc. But that doesn't sound like it's welcome any more (we previously had stuff about debate, if I remember), which kinda steers Civi away from that, reducing its social purpose.

Super minor point, but I'm not sure we need Dignity and Respect; I think dignity and respect should suffice

I think it's a fair point that the policy should set out who is responsible for moderating.. ie is it anyone with website edit access, and the Community Council is there to handle appeals/disputes? And if so, how does that work?

And yes - given there are many spaces where we can share our views like Mattermost and Gitlab - to try to strip this new policy right back to whatever sits outside the Code of Conduct but which is specific to the blog.

I also agree that 'the right to comfort' is a subjective idea and therefore potentially tricky to police, and so does invite questioning. Someone on Twitter felt uncomfortable about me using the word 'crazy' pejoratively, I too felt uncomfortable by their response, shaming me to their followers as 'ableist' which I still feel offended by. There was a missing conversation that could have saved a lot of wasted emotions (as it feels is the heart of the issue with your pulled comment).

Inconvenient truths ('this phone was made by slave/child labour', 'this person doesn't seem to be doing their job' etc) can cause discomfort we'd often rather shy from, shouldn't be silenced. So is the heart of this question about removing the personal judgements around discomforting truths in community spaces?

ie 'your phone was made by slave/child labour so you must be a monster' or 'this person is incompetent and useless' obviously isn't ok; but 'actually this phone was made by kids' or 'this person hasn't replied to an email in three months' etc, would also be weird to censor if they're true. And because blogs have open comments, someone else can still reply defending the phone company or the person, or questioning the facts - ie, the key is avoiding judgements of people in a public community space?

Not sure what this means - "announcements from labour or political organizations" - there are a lot of "labour or political organizations" that use CiviCRM, why should they be prohibited from doing blog posts?

Just a note - I think that 'relevance' is important with the blog. I just looked at a couple of blog posts which didn't seem to be relevant to CiviCRM - but rather seemed like 'in general if you have a membership site you might want to engage with your members like x' - I do think content needs to relate to how one uses CiviCRM. That gets back to 'what is the blog for'?

I'm not convinced this is entirely bad if done correctly. Many competing CRM vendors offer free presentations that are quite similar from people in their extended networks. I've done some on preparing for a migration to a new CRM and on data cleanliness. Nor is it necessary to hawk a product to get business from folks who need your expertise.

I'll admit I didn't really read the posts in question because they weren't aimed at me. And I mostly agree they don't belong on the blog - but these posts could be made to a specific mailing list of people who indicate they're interested. I volunteer to do some research on a platform that would allow us to do that.

@JonGold I think you're right, but I think we need something that ties it in with CiviCRM. So not just a 'reactivation strategy', but how you might implement that specifically in CiviCRM, for example.

Couldn't agree more Eileen. This is the CiviCRM Community Blog. There are plenty of places online for people to promote their wares / give generic information that could be sourced with a simple google. I'm going to take this point back to the council and see how we can improve the guidelines to make that more clear as "relevance" is really important here and something we discussed when trying to come up with these guidelines.

@artfulrobot Thanks so much for your comments. I always appreciate hearing your point of view. I really like a line from your post "we don't all agree and that can be a good thing if we listen and consider and debate". Would you be happy for us to incorporate that into the guidelines? I think that really captures what we wanted the guidelines to encourage.

It feels like we're circling around the issue that there's one person filling civicrm.org/blog with marketing posts that don't mention Civi, can require you to click to their site to read the full article (ie https://civicrm.org/blog/farhadkhan/8-ways-make-your-website-and-member-portal-more-accessible) or are badly formatted (ie https://civicrm.org/blog/farhadkhan/how-increase-your-member-retention-new-marketing-strategy). Perfecting the words of this policy could be a few more weeks of discussion - in the meantime is there a policy we could all agree on that stops the Civi News dashlet from being filled with what looks like SEO content? Or could someone even just have a chat with Farhad and ask them to unpublish their blogs and limit posting to stuff that's CiviCRM-related (or even just CRM-related, following Jon's point)?

Further to ^^ - I think maybe we should consider some blogs not appearing on our main news feed - eg. people could be limited to one blog in the main news feed every 6 weeks & if people want to read more of their material they could click through on the author to read more by that person. Obvious exceptions would be events, releases, information about what is going into the core code base.

Just came here to say that we removed the CiviCRM Community News Dashlet from CiviCRM for two reasons:

There were too many "SPAM" blog posts appearing in the feed, and
Blog posts were regularly not appropriate for an end user audience

Where my definition of "SPAM" is being self-promotion without providing any value to the reader.

End users are not interested in technical discussions or announcements. And having this type of information shown prominently on the first screen they see can be confusing, cause uncertainty and raise concerns about the viability of the product they are using.

I've mentioned this a few times now over the years.

I do think that the ability for technical blog posts to be publicised is valuable but this should reach the interested audience instead of being a broadcast to all. Posting this type of information in Gitlab or Github would be a more logical place for this information IMHO.

Good points @justinfreeman I agree that the main blog feed, and definitely the one shown in-app, should be end-user focussed. Occasional technical stuff is ok there, users are happy to know that there's nerdy stuff going on, but when it is, there should be an end user focussed intro as to why. e.g. token changes - the details may be very technical (token processor this, flexmailer that) but end users might benefit from knowing "what to do now", or at least that there's something they need to discuss with their provider.

We have lab, stackexchange, etc. for other posts.

I'm going to pick on this a little @justinfreeman at the risk of going off topic. Ultimately, my main point is to highlight again that the fundamental problem is that we don't clearly know what the blog is for, so establishing guidelines for it feels haphazard. Humor me while I pick on you though...

There were too many "SPAM" blog posts appearing in the feed

I don't disagree per se, however it's hard to quantify what is "SPAM" and what isn't. What we thought (you and me and others) was spam when too many blog posts were being posted promoting events cost the project a Gold Partner and cost me a personal friendship, which I miss to this day. I would be very cautious about what we call SPAM going forward.

Blog posts were regularly not appropriate for an end user audience

Says who? I mean, seriously... who do we think we are that we can determine what is appropriate for end users and what isn't? How many people on this thread consider themselves first and foremost an "end user"? Again, I think we should be really cautious here. I find the idea of somebody telling me, who is an end user, what I should or shouldn't see as at best off-putting and at worst, well, more off-putting. I mean this with all do sincerity... sometimes I think we underestimate end uers and tend to over-engineer stuff when all we really need to do is write authentically to that specific audience.

Clearly, some "blog post" belong in a more technical space. It just makes sense. But at the same time, we could do a lot better job of writing about key developments in the project specifically for the end user audience. We might find that they 1) understand Civi better 2) feel more included and 3) engagement more.

@MikeyMJCO said it that the horse has already bolted from the barn (and probably run a few laps around the pasture), but I'm still an advocate for reigning that bad boy in and better defining what the blog should be. It has implications beyond just the content. For example, if it's a "community blog", what's it doing on the homepage of civicrm.org which is the top marketing asset for new potential users?

I'll stop now. Sorry if I'm coming across overly direct, but I'm worried that we're going down the road of over-engineering "something", but we're not really sure what that something is.

I didn't realise that about those event posts. I remember that situation and had no idea it would have led to that. Am sorry to hear. At least his posts were about CiviCRM, it was just that there were many more of them than anything else.

Maybe frequency is the issue? Looking at my Civi news Dashlet, ie what's fed into potentially 11,000 organisations' intranets: four of these 10 stories - 40% - are written by one person, and only one of those mentions CiviCRM. The rest look like stories that could be found on 10000s of adwords websites; when I had an open access blog I'd get dozens of auto submissions like that from people & bots whose job was content marketing. One or maybe even two of them I'd overlook as the price of having an open community blog. Four out of ten makes me think we need a policy to stop it!

OR - maybe more elegantly - only use RSS for the dashlet from those blog posts which have 'promote to front page' on them, and don't give every blog contributor that right? Then you could have a clearer policy about what Community blog posts are exposed in the app - ie they should related directly to CiviCRM.

Control is good - but I don't want these kinds of posts on the blog at all - them being in app is a side-issue. They aren't of the quality, tone or usefulness bar I want for the blog at large.

With regards your earlier comments - Farhad has been approached and the posts have been edited a bit from their original forms - we can't currently remove the posts without setting a bad precedent - we need the policy to enforce against otherwise it's too adhoc.

That makes sense.

Sidenote: this makes me wonder - what about having a community/council/both appointed blog editor (perhaps even part of the council election process) who - as you are doing - does quality control, and is both answerable for those decisions and thus limits inconsistent decisions? But answerable to the council in case of an appeal.

Since our name has been brought up, allow me to share our voice.

I think there is some misunderstanding around our intentions behind our content, namely our blogs.

We have made working with CiviCRM our chosen craft and encourage those around us to use CiviCRM as a superior system to the (often) clunky systems they use. Through our blogs, we try to highlight the real world problems that people have (that we find our clients have, both CiviCRM users and potential CiviCRM users alike) that CiviCRM can solve.

However, as I am reviewing the content, I do realize that some of the blogs we recently posted may not be relevant for the CiviCRM website and some might look spammy since the full content is not there. Honestly, this was never our intent and we will review these articles. These were posted by our marketing associate but I take full responsibility since I should have taken the time to review these before they were posted on the blog.

For our content, and for the level of awareness of our average clients, we try to take an outside in approach by helping people connect the dots from real-business problems they have and show them how civicrm can solve those problems.

The CiviCRM world is big and wide and deep, and our minds all approach problems differently, and perhaps it is possible that our real world problem solving approach speaks to some people.

We build membership websites for associations with CiviCRM at it's core. Our webinars are attended by hundreds of people. Our content topics are directly taken from questions that our real audience is asking. We demo and promote CiviCRM to all these associations with the effort to increase CiviCRM adoption in the association sector.

Please see the attached screenshot where our audience submitted membership questions. ALL questions are non-technical and they relate to real business problems associations are having, which we solve with CiviCRM.

@josh here highlighted that there isn't one end-user persona in mind for the CiviCRM community. We have been able to make meaningful connections within the CiviCRM community for whom our niche contribution speaks to them.

With regards to the screenshot shared here of the 10 most recent blogs: It is not our goal to "hog" the slots in the most recent blog listings. We create a new blog every couple of weeks, and we share it here for people's consideration, but we will be much more careful to ensure the content we share on the CiviCRM blog is more relevant to the audience here.

Thank you for taking the time to see how we approach our content, which is big-picture problem first, strategy second, and CiviCRM to make the magic happen.

Wishing everyone success.

@FarhadKhan I don't doubt the intention behind your posts - but their tone is far too close to pure "SEO" marketing content.

The purpose you suggested below is good "To share what business problems CiviCRM can help you solve and how" my issue is that your current posts are missing the second half - they don't share how to solve the business problems - they require the reader to visit your site - or originally sign up via your Monster Campaigns link to get close to that information. That, along with their tone and style makes them unsuitable for the blog in my eyes.

The style of your posts is predominantly where I have an issue - they don't appear to be written to share information or solutions - but to drive marketing to your site - the Monster Campaigns links have been removed after prompts but the content is unchanged. It doesn't solve problems - it lists vagueries and then implores the visitor to go to your site to learn more. If the general opinion of the community is that this is what the blog is for - neither I nor the community council can really stop this outside of proposing, discussing and implementing guidelines and a purpose statement - but if every partner starts doing this style content on CiviCRM.org - we'll very quickly end up with a great blog for marketing partners - but a completely useless one for communicating with our community and end users in a meaningful way.

Maybe the answer here is that we need to further separate our "spaces" and shift the community building/communication efforts from CiviCRM.org to CiviCRM.community much like Spark is moving from civicrm.org to civicrm.com as a commercial service. This would leave civicrm.org as the site/domain for the software with community content moving to a new home.

There's a valid point surfacing in the purpose discussions - which are worth having - and perhaps the conclusion must be that the blog's purpose is too wide and we need to separate community, marketing and commercial content in a clearer way.

I also want to make it clear that this isn't in any way personal - I don't mean to have singled out your content - it's simply the clearest example of content I don't feel adds value to the blog for me, my customers or the community-at-large.

@MikeyMJCO, before we started sharing blogs on civicrm.org, we met with a civicrm.org employee on multiple occasions to ask the best ways to engage the civicrm.org community and what their advice is for the blog. We were advised by a core member to use the blog to drive traffic to our site. This was encouraged and it was not even suggested that this is disdainful. We have actually reached out to you twice to ask you for your suggestions but hadn't heard back.

Our articles are widely read by our audience who are executives and managers who are not looking to be involved with CiviCRM in a practical way. They want to delegate and outsource the work. Our blogs are regularly picked up and shared within our niche and our audience finds the high-level (and yes, not hands-on practical advice) thought-provoking and helpful to reset priorities. Solutions to real-world problems are complex and will not be resolved in a blog post. We are available to have a conversation about problems in detail rather than one-size-fits-all advice.

May I ask if you find it in the spirit of a tread about respectful engagement to say that our content is "simply the clearest example of content I don't feel adds value to the blog"?

Without knowing how frequently we connect with people from civicrm.org, how can you make that judgement?

We reached out to you to speak with you directly so that our tone would be seen for what it is; earnest and not confrontational.

@MikeyMJCO, before we started sharing blogs on civicrm.org, we met with a civicrm.org employee on multiple occasions to ask the best ways to engage the civicrm.org community and what their advice is for the blog. We were advised by a core member to use the blog to drive traffic to our site. This was encouraged and it was not even suggested that this is disdainful. We have actually reached out to you twice to ask you for your suggestions but hadn't heard back.

I think that's important information that was missing from this discussion. This must also be frustrating for you and I appreciate you engaging with us on this. There are core team members who feel otherwise (ie here) so maybe the core team member you spoke with can clarify. Ultimately this all underpins the purpose of this thread - that there needs to be clearer guidelines about for what and how the blog should be used.

I, like you, suffer from a lack of time - I have limited time to dedicate to community efforts for CiviCRM - I have had contact requests via LinkedIn which I will return to setup a meeting to discuss.

You seem to think that the metric is how many people from CiviCRM.org connect with you is the deciding factor - I don't agree. The blog post may drive a ton of traffic to you - that doesn't make it appropriate for the blog on CiviCRM.org - marketing for your agency/services belongs on your own site. We have to think wider than content which benefits a single provider or partner - the blog is a community space - the content should benefit the community - of course this becomes more difficult to define and determine.

I can't speak to advice given by a CiviCRM.org employee as I'm not privy to that advice, I will say that I think the advice is phrased too broadly. Driving traffic to your site is fine - as long as the post has standalone benefit to the community without the link to your site/contact us call to action. There are many examples of blog posts which make it clear that a partner can be contacted for further information - whilst having standalone benefit.

I'm making these judgements as a community member who reads every blog post that goes up on CiviCRM.org and regularly shares these with our clients as well as in my role as a member of the community council. I don't claim that my judgements are - or should be widely held - I'm proud of the moves the CiviCRM community is making towards democratic processes - I'd like to see this area as another democratically determined set of rules/expectations and a statement of purpose. It won't - and shouldn't - 100% encompass what I want from it - that's not how this works - it will be, and the proposed statement is, a reflection of the diverse views of the community council and by the end of this process - I would hope it will reflect the input from the community which has been solicited by posting this issue.

I agree with @nicol that the fact that you spoke to a CiviCRM employee and were given this advice has not surfaced thus far in discussions around these blog posts - at least not in the terms you've described it.

I'm happy to identify as the one that stated to @FarhadKhan as well as to other partners and contributors that the blog is a resource to discuss CiviCRM, to promote new features, functionality, services, etc., and to, in general, raise awareness about "things that are happening" in CiviLand. I've always stated to keep it relevant and overly sales-y. And, of course, to abide by our community guidelines.

I don't agree that this point is particularly relevant to this discussion given that the blog has always been this way. This isn't anything new. Events have been promoted. Extensions have been promoted. Integrations have been promoted. Services have been introduced and promoted. This has been the nature of the blog for a long time.

This is where communication comes in. We were not asked how we came to write the blogs as we do, or if we need (further) direction. Again, we have reached out to you multiple times.

@MikeyMJCO I disagree with your use of the word "community." In my community, and my perception of the global community and CiviCRM community, there are people of all stripes, interests and levels of awareness. The fact that something serves the needs of "outliers" or "extremes" or a "niche" doesn't mean that it doesn't benefit the community. In your mind, do accessibility features, or a sign language interpreter at a press conference not serve the "community"? A community is made up of its individual members. The fact that Civicrm.org community members see value in our services and expertise supports the point that we serve the community.

Can you please speak to my question about whether you feel your public comments about our work are respectful and in the spirit of what you want seen in this community? At my place of work, if we would single someone out and insult them repeatedly, this would be grounds for dismissal. As a member of the CiviCRM community, I would vote for our moderators to squash personal attacks and create rules that uphold their goals and values.

Benefitting the community should be the primary purpose of a post on the blog - the primary purpose of your posts is to drive traffic to your site. Therein lies my primary issue with them.

I appreciate that you have attempted to reach out - however my community role is voluntary and unpaid and, respectfully, I'm under no obligation to respond to anyone on any timescale other than my own.

Can you please speak to my question about whether you feel your public comments about our work are respectful and in the spirit of what you want seen in this community? At my place of work, if we would single someone out and insult them repeatedly, this would be grounds for dismissal. As a member of the CiviCRM community, I would vote for our moderators to squash personal attacks and create rules that uphold their goals and values.

I am not aware of having directed insults at anyone or singled you out specifically in a public forum, I have described the posts themselves as spam publicly - I still feel that they are, in many ways, spam - they have no standalone benefit without contacting your organisation and as such are purely marketing content which I don't find appropriate for the blog and the posts have been surfaced here as examples of undesirable posts. My intention has always been to protect the blog as a useful source of information and content - I apologise unreservedly and profusely for any personal offense that my comments may have caused, that has never been my intention.

I am not a "moderator" in any sense of the word - I have no permissions or roles on CiviCRM.org that allow me to edit, unpublish or remove content. I am an elected member of the community council and at present the primary maintainer of the documentation infrastructure - nothing more.

Thanks for unpublishing the other articles for now.

The fact that something serves the needs of "outliers" or "extremes" or a "niche" doesn't mean that it doesn't benefit the community. In your mind, do accessibility features, or a sign language interpreter at a press conference not serve the "community"?

@FarhadKhan - just to clarify - the issue isn't that you wrote about accessibility (which is of course of big concern to us) but that the blog didn't mention it. Same as if you wrote an article about WordPress or PHP or CSS or how to write a great email newsletter - the centre of this issue (to me) is that there needs to be clear reference to CiviCRM (plus WordPress, CSS, newsletters, etc(

2c (or 3c):

I think it's good for civicrm.org to provide blog-style media for multiple audiences and multiple types of content. If there's contention about putting them under one heading ("The Blog", /blog, etc), then rework the layout (headings/pageflow/filters/etc).
Regarding upfront/before-the-fact reviews, I'm on the fence. It's a trade (higher quality vs higher effort and lower throughput). I'd be fine either way. But... if we did before-the-fact reviews, then I'd really encourage something more like PR/MR flow on Github/Gitlab, eg
- The queue is public(ish) and watchable.
- All posts go through the queue.
- You don't need special rights to add to the queue.
- There can be discussion, suggestions, inline comments.
- There are multiple people who can approve - approval from any one person is sufficient.
- If there's some ambiguity or disagreement, it's easy to @mention other folks for feedback/support.
@eileen's idea of a throttle (1 promoted post per month) is quite appealing - it's fairly simple/objective change on top of the current practice, and it has an easy sort of fairness. It would be amenable to either manual or automatic enforcement (either way, the simplicity of the rule makes it easy to enforce).

A lot of great thoughts here!

I agree that the blog should have a stated purpose. I suggest the purpose of the blog is:

To provide information about how to use CiviCRM effectively. Tutorials, announcements about new features in CiviCRM core, extension announcements and case studies are all welcome as long as they discuss CiviCRM specifically.
To provide opportunities for engagement with the CiviCRM project and CiviCRM community. Requests for input/feedback about core/extension development, news from the Community Council or regional user groups, discussions about growing CiviCRM, etc, are welcome.
Information about events is welcome, as long as the primary purpose of those events is one of the two purposes above.

Driving business is fine, as long as it's in the form of useful content that serves one of the purposes above. @josh gives a hypothetical about simply advertising a private, for-profit service that claims to grows the Civi user base -- that seems iffy to me. (Unlike Spark, whose primary purpose as I understand it, is to grow the user base, not to turn a profit.) @MikeyMJCO suggests limiting adverts to "an event or service which benefits the community at large rather than a single provider", and that's right, but who decides what benefits the community at large? Perhaps that's a job for the community council. People will get upset about these decisions sometimes, but I think it's worth making them, and better to have a community-elected body do it.

In any case, I agree that it should be clear what the moderation process is and who's doing it. I think @totten's PR-style idea could work, perhaps with some referrals to the Community Council for tricky cases as mentioned above.

I'd be fine with throttling post frequency to some reasonable extent, to allow a diversity of voices to be heard.

As for who the target audience is, why not let users decide for themselves. Allow the feed to be filtered by tag, and make sure every post is tagged with one or more of "user", "administrator", or "developer". Set the filter to some sensible default on install (I'd argue for "user"), and make it obvious that it can be changed. Would this be a good solution for @justinfreeman et al?

Agreed that blog guidelines should not restate the Code of Conduct/Community Guidelines.

Lastly, fwiw, I think the purpose I give above leaves room for debate and doesn't prioritize comfort over truth-telling (the concern voiced by @artfulrobot and others).

Hi @noah thanks for this, a stated purpose for the blog will be helpful. May I add another purpose to the mix?

- To share what business problems CiviCRM can help you solve and how

We speak to hundreds of associations and promote CiviCRM to them, unless we can connect the dot between their real world business problems and how Civi can help solve those, it will be very difficult to increase Civi adoption in this sector. Please see my other reply here #22 (comment 66695)

I think this is a good purpose to have - but we'd have to be clear that the how has to be in the blog content. It can't be a link to find out more or to a single provider's site or a "contact us" style call to action.

If we're seriously interested in sharing the "how" it needs to be applicable to other partners, end users, self-implementers alike.

@MikeyMJCO I agree with you that the articles should be complete on their own, and not like the incomplete articles we recently posted (which we will review ASAP), but respectfully disagree that they cannot link to additional content or more information back to a single provider's site.

Partnerships with businesses like ours will only drive more CiviCRM adoption.

@noah @nicol @josh Would you care to weigh in on this topic?

To be clear - they absolutely can link back to a provider's site - but they should be complete on their own - including solutions to those business needs in enough detail to be useful.

The article shouldn't describe a problem and then say "contact us for solutions" or similar in my view.

@MikeyMJCO Agreed!

@FarhadKhan if you agree - then why is this blog post - https://civicrm.org/blog/farhadkhan/8-ways-make-your-website-and-member-portal-more-accessible - still up, with three paragraphs then a link to your website to get the main article.

I appreciate you trying to engage in this conversation, but there's also nothing about CiviCRM in those three paragraphs or the linked article. I think there is a pretty unanimous sense in the community that blog posts need to be about CiviCRM. How to make your Civi Contribution page or Civi admin dashboard more accessible would be ok, but this is a general purpose article.

If I look at other articles, ie https://civicrm.org/blog/farhadkhan/top-12-member-onboarding-tips-associations-automate-and-enhance-new-member and https://civicrm.org/blog/farhadkhan/5-reasons-build-customized-member-portal-0 - there's no mention of CiviCRM. You could syndicate these articles to a SugarCRM, Nation Builder or Salesforce blog. The second of those links also is just three paragraphs then the full article on your website. Phrases like "The CRM you are using is extremely helpful, but there are gaps between what your association wants to achieve and the limitations of your current website and CRM capabilities" makes me wonder if it's written for other CRMs too because you haven't written 'CiviCRM is extremely helpful'.

You've got one article I can find that's about CiviCRM - the data migration one. So I think that should be ok to stay, but the others should be unpublished ASAP because:

there's no mention of CiviCRM
two of them provide the full article on a separate website, ie they use CiviCRM's good SEO ranking and provide limited value to the Civi community.

@MikeyMJCO - if Farhad doesn't agree with this - I guess we need to quickly agree rules on the blog - could we have a new issue that's just something really short and simple like the below? Then we can have a quick emoji vote on it - and adopt it if it passes:

blogs must be about CiviCRM
blogs must appear in full, and cannot be split over an external website
blogs must follow the Community Code of Conduct

@nicol I just got to see this thread yesterday late afternoon, we are extremely busy, please give us a week to review the articles. Or is that unreasonable to ask?

@nicol Please also see my previous response here #22 (comment 66695)

@FarhadKhan - I appreciate you're trying to to get this right. Maybe you could unpublish them while reviewing/adjusting them?

@nicol Happy to unpublish the above mentioned articles while we review.

Hello everyone. I wanted to provide an update on where the Community Council is with this issue and our next steps.

Firstly, a huge thank you to everyone for taking the time to read and participate in this issue. I personally have read every comment and know that many other council members have too, and we've incorporated many of these into the final version we're preparing to post.

Our aim is to have these guidelines are owned by the community, and that all community members can continue to feed into and develop them over time as we have done here.

There were also comments that were not specifically about the guidelines, but how we might want to review other elements of the community blog, which we will be keeping on our agenda going forward to continue to discuss.

One thing that this also raised was how we can make the council more visible and transparent, and this is something we're actively discussing and looking to improve in 2022.

Thanks for all of your work on this - you and the rest of the Community Council!

It's been a tough couple of years for getting anything done beyond the necessities, so no hard feelings or big concerns, but the terms of half of the council expired last spring, and the remainder expire soon. We are due for an election.

Maybe this would be a great way to meet the goals of making the council more visible and transparent.

Thanks for the update… Seconding Andie's words.

One thing that this also raised was how we can make the council more visible and transparent, and this is something we're actively discussing and looking to improve in 2022.

When I joined your call last year - it was suggested the Council would add a /community-council page on civicrm.org listing the names of current council members and an email address to contact them collectively on (and maybe links to previous council/election related blogs). It would transform transparency from nothing to something and be a prettyy small job - it could even just be a list of council members for now. Is this held up because no-one has site access to create it?

Thanks @andie for your understanding. It was certainly an interesting time to try to get the council off the ground and find our direction!

We absolutely are working on the election and are very aware this needs to be addressed with a plan to start the process in March.

@nicol I don't think that anyone has site access to create page and would be great if you're able to support? Please feel free to email me directly and I'd be happy to get this off the group with you.

I believe several folks on the council should already have access. Thinking perhaps Joe M and Mikey, for example. Access should not be a barrier.

Thanks @josh Nic is kindly helping to get a basic page online and we'll continue to update from there.

As a starting point have added something simple here: https://civicrm.org/community-council - and put a link in the top about sub-menu. Obvs please change/move/remove/etc as needed.

Thank you @nicol !

We've now created and published the (very bare!) Community Handbook here: https://docs.civicrm.org/handbook/en/latest/

and our community council page here: https://civicrm.org/community-council

We're working on both of these - please feel free to contribute to the handbook and we'd welcome suggestions for other policies which should exist in there (issues against the handbook would be ideal - https://lab.civicrm.org/documentation/docs/handbook

Closing this issue now - thanks to all for participating and the excellent feedback.

closed

Thank you @MikeyMJCO great to have a space where the whole community can contribute to the development!

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