Updating our Code of Conduct 🤝

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:rotating_light: This is a new Code of Conduct for the Radicle community, proposed by the Community team. It’s goal is to add some more structure to our collective community standards and establish a process for resolving and evaluating conflict. This Code of Conduct will be up for community review over the next week. Please drop any comments, concerns, or feedback in this post :pray:

:bulb: This is a modified fork of the Contributor’s Covenant — an open-source code of conduct created by Coraline Ada Ehmke and stewarded by the Organization for Ethical Source.

Our Pledge

We as members, contributors, and leaders pledge to make participation in our community a harassment-free experience for everyone, regardless of age, body size, visible or invisible disability, ethnicity, sex characteristics, gender identity and expression, level of experience, education, socio-economic status, nationality, personal appearance, race, caste, color, religion, or sexual identity and orientation.

We pledge to act and interact in ways that contribute to an open, welcoming, diverse, inclusive, and healthy community.

Our Standards

Examples of behavior that contributes to a positive environment for our community include:

  • Demonstrating empathy and kindness toward other people
  • Being respectful of differing opinions, viewpoints, and experiences
  • Giving and gracefully accepting constructive feedback
  • Accepting responsibility and apologizing to those affected by our mistakes, and learning from the experience
  • Focusing on what is best not just for us as individuals, but for the overall community

Examples of unacceptable behavior include:

  • The use of sexualized language or imagery, and sexual attention or advances of any kind
  • Trolling, insulting or derogatory comments, and personal or political attacks
  • Public or private harassment
  • Publishing others’ private information, such as a physical or email address, without their explicit permission
  • Other conduct which could reasonably be considered inappropriate in a professional setting

:exclamation: Any community member acting as an active delegate is required to adhere to an additional set of standards to ensure healthy & safe community governance. You can find these standards here → Delegate Standards

Enforcement Responsibilities

Community leaders are responsible for clarifying and enforcing our standards of acceptable behavior and will take appropriate and fair corrective action in response to any behavior that they deem inappropriate, threatening, offensive, or harmful.

Community leaders have the right and responsibility to remove, edit, or reject comments, commits, code, wiki edits, issues, and other contributions that are not aligned with this Code of Conduct, and will communicate reasons for moderation decisions when appropriate.

Current Community Leaders

Scope

This Code of Conduct applies within all community spaces and also applies when an individual is representing the community in public spaces.

Examples of representing our community include using a Radicle email address, posting via a Radicle-affiliated social media account, interacting with others on Discord using a designated role (i.e. Radicles) or acting as a representative at an online or offline event (i.e. speaking engagements, workshops etc…).

Enforcement

Instances of abusive, harassing, or otherwise unacceptable behavior may be reported to the community leaders responsible for enforcement at abbey@radicle.xyz. All complaints will be reviewed and investigated by community leaders promptly and fairly. They will be responsible for:

  • Initiating action regarding any violation ASAP (“promptly”)
  • Publicly communicating reasoning & guidelines followed for any enforcement taken (“fairly”)

All community leaders are obligated to respect the privacy and security of the reporter of any incident.

Enforcement Guidelines

Community leaders will follow these Community Impact Guidelines in determining the consequences for any action they deem in violation of this Code of Conduct:

  1. :white_check_mark: Correction
    • Type of Violation: Use of inappropriate language or other behavior deemed unprofessional or unwelcome in the community.
    • Consequence: A private, written warning from community leaders, providing clarity around the nature of the violation and an explanation of why the behavior was inappropriate. A public apology may be requested.
  2. :rotating_light: Warning
    • Type of Violation: A violation through a single incident or series of actions.
    • Consequence: A warning with consequences for continued behavior. No interaction with the people involved, including unsolicited interaction with those enforcing the Code of Conduct, for a specified period of time. This includes avoiding interactions in community spaces as well as external channels like social media. Violating these terms may lead to a temporary or permanent ban.
  3. :wave: Temporary Ban
    • Type of Violation: A serious violation of community standards, including sustained inappropriate behavior.
    • Consequence: A temporary ban from any sort of interaction or public communication with the community for a specified period of time. No public or private interaction with the people involved, including unsolicited interaction with those enforcing the Code of Conduct, is allowed during this period. Violating these terms may lead to a permanent ban.
  4. :no_entry_sign: Permanent Ban
    • Type of Violation: Demonstrating a pattern of violation of community standards, including sustained inappropriate behavior, harassment of an individual, or aggression toward or disparagement of classes of individuals.
    • Consequence: A permanent ban from any sort of public interaction within the community.

Attribution

:space_invader: This Code of Conduct is adapted from the Contributor Covenant, version 2.1, available at https://www.contributor-covenant.org/version/2/1/code_of_conduct.html.

:fox_face: Community Impact Guidelines were inspired by Mozilla’s code of conduct enforcement ladder. Delegation Standards were inspired by MakerDAO’s Recognised Delegate Code of Conduct.

:question: For answers to common questions about this code of conduct, see the FAQ at https://www.contributor-covenant.org/faq. Translations are available at https://www.contributor-covenant.org/translations.

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I noticed a few minor improvements that could be made:

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How about a couple of words on what was modified and (if necessary) the thinking behind it?
If someone already is familiar with the Contributor’s Covenant, this would help them understand how different this Code of Conduct is and why.

From past experience, I have found that one topic of contention for “other conduct” is humour. “I only meant it as a joke” has been a common response I have often had to deal with. I would like to see an addition to this CoC that certainly doesn’t ban humour (what kind of world would that be for our children! : ) ), but that also politely reminds people that their own sense of humour may be seen as offensive in other parts of the world / in other communities / by people who don’t actually know you / etc. etc.

What if I want to report an issue about the behaviour of one of the community leaders?

It is not clear to me exactly who is making this assertion. The community leaders? If so, can we reword to indicate that?
Also, how do we ensure investigation happens “promptly and fairly”? Is there any control or process in place that helps with this ?

On top of the enforcement-related sections, which I agree are important because there needs to be some basis of justice around which a community can be built, I would also love to see a section around positive actions and reinforcement by community leaders.

As much as I feel that the community leaders are responsible to “drive out the bad folks”, I also think it is within their responsibilities to “keep the good folks in”. I would love to see some thoughts around actions the community leaders are expected to take when they recognise actions that help the community. And just like this CoC explains that when community members see some bad behaviour they can report it to the community leaders, I would like it if the CoC explained to community members that they can also mention positive behaviour to community leaders.

Hope that helps!
Yorgos

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Thanks for the edits @Jayman ! I’ve included them in the original post.

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The modifications are actually quite minimal. The only changes are introducing Radicle-specific language (e.g. examples of representing the Radicle community), adding a set of Delegate Standards, and adjusting the enforcement section to reflect how we believe enforcement would actually happen in our community.

I understand your point. As a replacement to the “Other conduct which could reasonably be considered inappropriate in a professional setting” point, how about we add a section that provides guidance on navigating contentious behavior.

I’ve taken a shot at drafting it. The bullet points are a combination of relevant points from other open-source CoC’s (e.g. Rust, GitLab, Ruby etc…):

When navigating contentious conduct & behavior be sure to use the following guidelines:

  • When interpreting the words and actions of others, assume good intentions first.*
  • Attempt collaboration before conflict. Seek clarity and practice empathy.*
  • Speak and act with good intentions but understand that intent and impact are not equivalent. Contemplate & acknowledge impact of actions. *
  • Practice respect & consideration of differing viewpoints and experiences. *
  • Ensure language and actions are free of personal attacks and disparaging personal remarks*

Lmk what you think.

Great point. I’d like to have at least 2-3 community leaders but need to draft them or have them volunteer :nerd_face: Will be sure to ask around before officially publishing this Code. But with a group of 2-3 leaders, then the enforcement guidelines should remain the same. Community leaders will be held to the same standard as the rest of the community.

Yes, it was implied that investigation happens by the community leaders. I’ve added some more context to the sentence.

Regarding what is “promptly and fairly”: perhaps we define it as the expectation that the community leaders will be responsible for:

  1. Initiating action regarding any violation ASAP (“promptly”)
  2. Publicly communicating reasoning & guidelines followed for any enforcement taken (“fairly”)

Great point!! Any suggestions that come to mind? With some initial research, I found that some CoC’s have a call-out to also report positive behavior in the community so it can be rewarded. Here’s some language I found:

“If you see someone who is making an extra effort to ensure our community is welcoming, friendly, and encourages all participants to contribute to the fullest extent, we want to know.”

Think we should include something like this? :point_up_2:

Really appreciate the thorough read-through and comments @yorgos! :slight_smile:

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The first 3 bullets sound like valuable additions. The last 2 … are they maybe repeating stuff we have already adequately expressed in the rest of the doc?

I would also like to suggest the 2 below points (from Chef Contributor Covenant Code of Conduct ):

  • Our community spans languages, cultures, perspectives (and continents!), and as such people may not understand jokes, sarcasm, and oblique references in the same way that you do. Remember that and be kind to the other members of the community.
  • Be cautious about making assumptions about what someone does or does not know about something - assuming that someone does not understand an issue and over explaining can be condescending (even when not intended to be so).

This is good to hear. I guess I was more thinking along the lines of “who watches the watchers” ; )

I was looking for some kind of way that disputes between community members and leaders can be resolved by a third party. After thinking about this a little further, I am not sure we want to commit to that right from the first version of the CoC, but perhaps over time I would like to see e.g. some mention of the possibility for community members to bring disputes over to something like https://kleros.io/ .

Yes, this is great!!

I would be inclined to further reinforce it so that it becomes clear that the role of the community leaders is not only to police others and I would even suggest we make it rather explicit (perhaps even changing the “Enforcement Responsibilities” heading ? perhaps make it “Community Leader responsibilities” ? ) :

The role of the Community Leaders is not just to enforce violations of the Code of Conduct. Community Leaders are not “police”. Rather they are responsible for a healthy community overall. That involves reinforcing and rewarding examples of positive behaviour, as much as enforcing CoC violations.

If you see someone who is making an extra effort to ensure our community is welcoming, friendly, and encourages all participants to contribute to the fullest extent, please do let the Community Leaders know, so they can help keep those folks around!

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