Hello!

Hi! On behalf of the community council, I'm writing you this status

update to let you know how we're doing. We haven't done one of these

updates in a while, so we hope it's interesting.

tl;dr: Nothing is currently on fire.

Our activities at present fall into two main categories: reacting to existing situations that we've been asked to address, and proactively looking into our policies to see how to improve them in the future.

In the first category, we have three ongoing (but unfortunately slow-moving) cases. One involves a hacker conference where we are seeking clarity about their safety policies; two involve people in the broader hacker community. We hope to have all of these resolved well before the end of this CC's tenure.

In the second category, we're working in two directions to try to improve decision-making for future community councils, so that they can do their jobs more effectively:

* We're working on a conflict-of-interest policy for community council

members. (We don't have any COI cases before us now, but we think

it's a good idea to get a solid policy written _before_ one comes

up, to prevent arguments.)

* We're working on a more formal information-continuity policy for the

community council. (At present, the community council does not keep

permanent records of past cases from one council to the next. This

protects privacy, but opens us to misunderstandings and possible

manipulation as council members rotate.) We are looking for a

'sweet spot' to allow us to preserve privacy while ensuring that

future community councils have a reliable way to reach out to former

councils for information.

Finally, to anybody thinking of volunteering the community council in the future: I'd strongly recommend it. The workload has been quite manageable, the people have been professional and kind, and the stress levels have been (so far) comparatively low.

best wishes,

Nick