The OPEN community code of conduct

Summary

The OPEN Network is dedicated to providing a harassment-free experience for everyone, regardless of gender, gender identity and expression, sexual identity and orientation, visible or invisible disability, physical appearance, body size, age, socio-economic status, class, position or role, language, level of experience or education, mental and physical ability, culture, nationality, immigration status, ethnicity, family status, caste, colour, race, or religion or lack thereof. We do not tolerate harassment of participants in any form.

We encourage you to:

• be friendly and patient,
• be welcoming,
• be considerate,
• be respectful,
• be careful in the words that you choose and be kind to others, and
• when we disagree, try to understand why.

This code of conduct applies to all the OPEN Network spaces, including our mailing lists, Slack workspaces (including the OPEN Network, and OPEN tech friends), GitHub issues, discussions and code repositories, Facebook groups, collaborative/shared documents, any other online forums or platforms we may host or use, plus all OPEN online and in-person events and summits, and social gatherings during and associated with such events. It applies to all of your communication and conduct in these spaces, including emails, chats, private messages, things you say, slides, images, videos, posters, signs, avatars, emojis, or even t-shirts you display in these spaces. Anyone who violates this code of conduct may be sanctioned or expelled from these spaces at the discretion of the OPEN Team.

Some OPEN Network spaces may have additional rules in place, which will be made clearly available to participants. Participants are responsible for knowing and abiding by these rules.

If you believe someone is violating the code of conduct, please report it by emailing conduct@the-open.net.

Full version

The OPEN Network is dedicated to providing a harassment-free experience for everyone, regardless of gender, gender identity and expression, sexual identity and orientation, visible or invisible disability, physical appearance, body size, age, socio-economic status, class, position or role, language, level of experience or education, mental and physical ability, culture, nationality, immigration status, ethnicity, family status, caste, colour, race, or religion or lack thereof.

This code of conduct applies to all the OPEN Network spaces, including our mailing lists, Slack workspaces (including the OPEN Network, and OPEN tech friends), GitHub issues, discussions and code repositories, Facebook groups, collaborative/shared documents, any other online forums or platforms we may host or use, plus all OPEN online and in-person events and summits, and social gatherings during and associated with such events. It applies to all of your communication and conduct in these spaces, including emails, chats, private messages, things you say, slides, images, videos, posters, signs, avatars, emojis, or even t-shirts you display in these spaces. Anyone who violates this code of conduct may be sanctioned or expelled from these spaces at the discretion of the OPEN Team.

Some OPEN Network spaces may have additional rules in place, which will be made clearly available to participants. Participants are responsible for knowing and abiding by these rules.

If you believe someone is violating the code of conduct, please report it by emailing conduct@the-open.net. For more details please see our Reporting Guide below.

• Be friendly and patient.

• Be welcoming. We strive to be a community that welcomes and supports people of all backgrounds and identities, regardless of gender, gender identity and expression, sexual identity and orientation, visible or invisible disability, physical appearance, body size, age, socio-economic status, class, position or role, language, level of experience or education, mental and physical ability, culture, nationality, immigration status, ethnicity, family status, caste, colour, race, or religion or lack thereof.

• Be considerate. Your work will be used by other people, and you in turn will depend on the work of others. Any decision you take will affect OPEN organisations and colleagues, and you should take those consequences into account. Remember that we’re a world-wide community, so you might not be communicating in someone else’s primary language. Many of our community members are here as part of their work, and content (words, images, videos) you share should be appropriate for professional workplaces.

• Be respectful. Not all of us will agree all the time, but disagreement is no excuse for poor behaviour and poor manners. We might all experience some frustration now and then, but we cannot allow that frustration to turn into a personal attack. It’s important to remember that a community where people feel uncomfortable or threatened is not a productive one.

• Be careful in the words and images that you choose and be kind to others. Do not insult or put down other people. Harassment and other exclusionary behaviour aren’t acceptable. In general, if someone asks you to stop, then stop. Persisting in such behaviour after being asked to stop is considered harassment. This includes, but is not limited to:

  • Offensive comments related to gender, gender identity and expression, sexual identity and orientation, visible or invisible disability, physical appearance, body size, age, socio-economic status, class, position or role, language, level of experience or education, mental and physical ability, culture, nationality, immigration status, ethnicity, family status, caste, colour, race, or religion or lack thereof.

  • Unwelcome comments regarding a person’s lifestyle choices and practices, including those related to food, health, parenting, drugs, and employment.

  • Deliberate misgendering or use of ‘dead’ or rejected names.

  • Gratuitous or off-topic sexual images or behaviour in spaces where they’re not appropriate.

  • Physical contact and simulated physical contact (eg, textual descriptions like “hug” or “backrub”) without consent or after a request to stop.

  • Threats of violence.

  • Incitement of violence towards any individual, including encouraging a person to commit suicide or to engage in self-harm.

  • Deliberate intimidation.

  • Stalking or following.

  • Harassing photography or recording, including logging online activity for harassment purposes.

  • Sustained disruption of discussion.

  • Unwelcome sexual attention.

  • Pattern of inappropriate social contact, such as requesting/assuming inappropriate levels of intimacy with others

  • Continued one-on-one communication after requests to cease.

  • Deliberate “outing” of any aspect of a person’s identity without their consent except as necessary to protect vulnerable people from intentional abuse.

  • Publication of non-harassing private communication.

  • Discriminatory jokes and language.

  • Posting sexually explicit or violent material.

  • Posting (or threatening to post) other people’s personally identifying information (“doxing”).

  • Personal insults, especially those using racist or sexist terms.

  • Advocating for, or encouraging, any of the above behaviour.

This isn’t an exhaustive list of things that you can’t do. Rather, take it in the spirit in which it’s intended - a guide to make it easier to communicate and participate in the community.

• When we disagree, try to understand why. Disagreements, both social and technical, happen all the time and OPEN is no exception. It is important that we resolve disagreements and differing views constructively. Remember that we’re different. The strength of OPEN comes from its varied community, people from a wide range of backgrounds. Different people have different perspectives on issues. Being unable to understand why someone holds a viewpoint doesn’t mean that they’re wrong. Don’t forget that it is human to err and blaming each other doesn’t get us anywhere. Instead, focus on helping to resolve issues and learning from mistakes.

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.

The OPEN Network prioritizes marginalized people’s safety over privileged people’s comfort. The team reserves the right not to act on complaints regarding:

• ‘Reverse’ -isms, including ‘reverse racism,’ ‘reverse sexism,’ and ‘cisphobia’
• Reasonable communication of boundaries, such as “leave me alone,” “go away,” or “I’m not discussing this with you.”
• Communicating in a ‘tone’ you don’t find congenial
• Criticizing racist, sexist, cissexist, or otherwise oppressive behavior or assumptions

Reporting Guide

If you are being harassed by a member of The OPEN Network, notice that someone else is being harassed, if you believe someone is violating the code of conduct, or have any other concerns, please email conduct@the-open.net, which goes to our conduct team (Aurora Adams, Laura James and Shilpa Mudiganti). If the person who is violating this code is on this team, or is an OPEN staff member, please email Avi who is the ombudsperson for OPEN’s governing body. We will respond as promptly as we can.

This code of conduct applies to OPEN Network spaces, as described above, but if you are being harassed by a member of the OPEN Network outside our spaces, we still want to know about it. We will take all good-faith reports of harassment by OPEN members seriously. This includes harassment outside our spaces and harassment that took place at any point in time. The abuse team reserves the right to exclude people from OPEN events and spaces based on their past behavior, including behavior outside OPEN spaces and behavior towards people who are not in the OPEN Network.

In order to protect volunteers and staff from abuse and burnout, we reserve the right to reject any report we believe to have been made in bad faith. Reports intended to silence legitimate criticism may not receive a response.

We will respect confidentiality requests for the purpose of protecting victims of abuse. At our discretion, we may publicly name a person about whom we’ve received harassment complaints, or privately warn third parties about them, if we believe that doing so will increase the safety of OPEN members or the general public. We will not name harassment victims without their affirmative consent.

Consequences

Participants asked to stop any harassing behavior are expected to comply immediately.

If a participant engages in harassing behavior, the OPEN team may take any action they deem appropriate, up to and including expulsion from all OPEN spaces and identification of the participant as a harasser to other OPEN Network members or the general public.

Attribution

This code is adapted from several sources including:

• the example policy from the Geek Feminism wiki, created by the Geek Feminism community.
• previous OPEN Tech community codes of conduct
• The lowRISC code of conduct, which is itself based on the LLVM Code of Conduct, which is based on the Django Project Code of Conduct, which is in turn based on wording from the Speak Up! Project.
• The Contributor Covenant

It is available for reuse under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License