Last updated 18 November 2020
We ask all community members to model and encourage the following behaviors:
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Be considerate in communication and actions, and actively seek to acknowledge and respect the boundaries of fellow CTPers. Refrain from demeaning, discriminatory, or harassing behavior and speech. We have members from many fields and communities with highly varied norms, and one of the things we’re proudest of in our project so far is that everyone is showing up with active kindness and respect.
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Attempt collaboration before conflict. Projects with very loose hierarchies can produce stressful situations in which it’s not immediately clear how to proceed, or who can make a final decision. It’s fine to put a pin in a discussion and ask for help from a team lead if you get stuck. Everyone here is working hard to do something important in a very weird situation, and the more kindness we show each other in our—inevitable, often highly fruitful—disagreements, the stronger our community and work will be. (This doesn’t mean we want you to ignore abusive or hostile situations.)
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Operate openly. At CTP, most core work happens in Slack channels accessible by all project contributors. Instead of insights being proprietary to a particular team or individual, this work is open to all in the project—from new contributors to those who have been around for a long time—to read and learn from. To support that collaborative spirit, you don’t need to bend over backwards to make all your conversations public for transparency’s own sake. Great work sometimes happens most organically in small spaces, and that’s completely okay. But you should have an attitude of generosity in sharing your insights and openness to collaborating with others—with the public channels serving as a space to do just that. Your ideas and knowledge become all the more powerful in the context of the community.
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Take care of each other. Alert any member of our Safety Team (listed below) if you notice a dangerous situation, someone in distress, or violations of our Code of Conduct, even if they seem inconsequential. And most importantly, if you notice that a peer is having a rough time and it doesn’t feel like an encouraging-emoji situation, please call on project leadership—we will do our best to connect that person with resources and support in every way that we can.
The COVID Tracking Project works in a highly politicized landscape and has been successful as a provider of vital information in part because we maintain consistent message discipline. We stay in our lane, we are fact-centric and non-partisan in our approach, and we maintain working relationships with both governmental agencies and a very wide range of research and journalistic organizations.
To support us in this work, we ask that all project contributors refrain from identifying themselves as official representatives of the CTP on social media, in contacts with press or government agencies, or in other circumstances unless you’ve received authorization to do so. It’s totally fine to have CTP in your online profiles/LinkedIn—but if you do, please be thoughtful about the way you interact with others as a member of the project. It’s also perfectly okay to take positions as individuals that we wouldn’t take as a project, as long as there’s no implication that your position is a de facto CTP position. We very much appreciate everyone’s willingness to keep our work low-drama and let us all focus on the work itself as much as possible.
We want everyone on the project to thrive within and outside of our community. We understand the desire to bring an insider understanding of our work at CTP to wider audiences, and much of the time, that’s fine—but sometimes it won’t be. And not always for obvious reasons!
What is insider understanding/knowledge? The COVID Tracking Project Slack is our community’s workplace, and we consider it (along with our internal video calls, project management tools, and other internal communication channels) to be both a private space and off the record. Everything not explicitly shared on our website, in our public API, on the COVID Tracking Project Twitter account, or in media interviews with CTP contributors authorized to speak on the project’s behalf should be considered private. We expect that every contributor will accord their colleagues the respect of maintaining this privacy by not publicly disclosing the internal-only documents, analyses, and conversations that allow us to do our work.
If you want to do an interview, give a talk, or otherwise publicly communicate something about the CTP or from our Slack or other internal channels that is not already public information, please get an advance OK from Alexis on the overall lines of what you’ll cover. (Ask in advance, please, and be willing to wait at least 24 hours for a response—usually we can respond right away, but not always.) Most of all, please ask yourself whether the thing you want to share with a wider audience could harm our relationships with state and territorial officials or damage our credibility as a project. If you’re not sure, just ask. The widespread trust in the data we compile is a significant public good, and we want to do everything we can to maintain it.
If you do report on internal-only data or analysis or on private communications, we may restrict your Slack account or remove you from the project, but we’d prefer to avoid all of that.
The COVID Tracking Project is committed to providing a welcoming and harassment-free environment for participants of all races, gender and trans statuses, sexual orientations, physical abilities, physical appearances, and beliefs. We’ve written this code of conduct not because we expect bad behavior from our community—which, in our experience, is overwhelmingly kind and civil—but because we believe a clear code of conduct is a necessary part of building a respectful community space.
This code of conduct outlines our expectations and norms for all those who participate in our community, as well as the consequences for unacceptable behavior.
We invite all those who participate in the COVID Tracking Project to help us create safe and positive experiences for everyone.
Discrimination and harassment are expressly prohibited in our community. Harassment may include, but is not limited to, intimidation; stalking; use of sexual or discriminatory imagery, comments, or jokes; intentional or repeated misgendering; sexist, racist, ableist, or otherwise discriminatory or derogatory language; and unwelcome sexual attention.
In order to provide such an environment, we commit to being considerate in our language use. Any behavior or language which is unwelcoming—whether or not it rises to the level of harassment—is also strongly discouraged.
Much exclusionary behavior takes the form of microaggressions -- subtle put-downs which may be unconsciously delivered. Regardless of intent, microaggressions can have a significant negative impact on the people who receive them and have no place in our community.
The same goes for tone policing, or responding negatively to the emotion behind a person’s message while ignoring its content (telling someone who is discussing an issue that makes them upset to “calm down” instead of responding to their concerns is an example of tone policing).
There are a host of behaviors and language common on technical projects which are worth noting as specifically unwelcome: Avoid “well, actuallys”—pedantic corrections that are often insulting and unproductive; never respond with surprise when someone asks for help; and take care neither to patronize others nor assume complete knowledge of a topic. This last point is especially important: Many women and people of color in our industries have many tales of being either condescended to about a field in which they are experts, or else excluded from learning opportunities because a colleague wouldn’t make an effort to answer questions—don’t be that person. Remember that your community members may have expertise you are unaware of, and listen at least as much as you speak.
Don’t be a jerk in any of these specific ways, but also just be good to each other.
Unacceptable behavior from any community member, including team leads, founders, and those with decision-making authority, will not be tolerated. This document gives several examples of unacceptable behavior, but other actions and interactions not described here might also warrant intervention or removal from the community.
Anyone asked to stop unacceptable behavior is expected to comply immediately.
If a community member engages in any kind of unacceptable behavior, whether described in this document or not, project leadership may take any action they deem appropriate, up to and including removal from the community without warning.
If you are subject to or witness unacceptable behavior, or have any other concerns, please tell one of the following project or safety leads as soon as possible. You can direct message one or all of us in Slack or find additional contact options in our profiles:
- Alexis Madrigal
- Kara Oehler
- Jessica Malaty Rivera
We expect all community members to abide by this Code of Conduct in all project spaces–Slack, Github, social channels, etc—as well as in all one-on-one communications pertaining to project business.
This Code of Conduct and its related procedures also applies to unacceptable behavior occurring outside the scope of community activities when such behavior has the potential to adversely affect the safety and well-being of community members.
Above text is licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. Credit to Citizen Code of Conduct, the Vox Media Product Team Code of Conduct, the Django Project’s code of conduct and the SRCCON Code of Conduct, from which we’ve extensively borrowed.