A Code of Conduct for Open Source Projects and Online Communities.
Code of Conduct is a fork of Community Covenant A Code of Conduct for Online Communities and Contributor Covenant A Code of Conduct for Open Source Projects.
If you’d like to leave feedback, please open an issue on GitHub.
Tools like IRC, HipChat, and Slack are creating new possibilities for the creation and growth of online communities. Communities thrive when their members share a common core set of values and put those values into practice through all of their interactions.
Creating Welcoming, Diverse, and Inclusive Communities
In order to keep an online community healthy and to make it possible for people of all types to participate fully, we need to be overt in our openness, welcoming all people to contribute, and pledging in return to value them as human beings and to foster an atmosphere of kindness, cooperation, and understanding.
The Community Covenant can be one way to foster such an atmosphere.
Open Source has always been a foundation of the Internet, and with the advent of social open source networks this is more true than ever. But free, libre, and open source projects suffer from a startling lack of diversity, with dramatically low representation by women, people of color, and other marginalized populations.
Part of this problem lies with the very structure of some projects: the use of insensitive language, thoughtless use of pronouns, assumptions of gender, and even sexualized or culturally insensitive names.
Marginalized people also suffer some of the unintended consequences of dogmatic insistence on meritocratic principles of governance. Studies have shown that organizational cultures that value meritocracy often result in greater inequality. People with “merit” are often excused for their bad behavior in public spaces based on the value of their technical contributions. Meritocracy also naively assumes a level playing field, in which everyone has access to the same resources, free time, and common life experiences to draw upon. These factors and more make contributing to open source a daunting prospect for many people, especially women and other underrepresented people. (For more critical analysis of meritocracy, refer to this entry on the Geek Feminism wiki.)
###A Small Step Forward
An easy way to begin addressing this problem is to be overt in our openness, welcoming all people to contribute, and pledging in return to value them as human beings and to foster an atmosphere of kindness, cooperation, and understanding.
The Contributor Covenant can be one way to express these values. Pledge your respect and appreciation for contributors and participants in your open source project by adding an explicit CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md to your project repository.
(While more focused on events and conferences, this 101 + FAQ addresses many of the common questions and concerns around codes of conduct.)