- What's the thing? Why do we need a Code of Conduct? We are all people with good intent only.
- Terminology
- Creating Awareness
- Incidents
- Consequences and Enforcement
- The Team
- Retrospectives / Aftermath
- Ideas for improvements
- Appendix
A Code of Conduct is the embodiment of a warm and open-hearted welcome to people from every background. It tells people that you are creating a safe space for everyone, regardless of their attributes. You need to say that invite loud and clear, otherwise it's just an empty discourse (or maybe not even that). You, as an organization, are giving your word and taking responsibility to lead in a positive direction for everyone your Code of Conduct welcomes. To make that possible, you have to tell people what they can rely on and you may need to enforce your words whenever necessary.
Your Code of Conduct is your statement, publicly setting an expectation to yourself in regards of your inclusivity, and everyone that attends the space that you have created, be it a speaker, a contributor, a sponsor, a partner, an organizer or a special or regular guest. With a Code of Conduct you are setting the lowest bar you are willing to accept regarding how people conduct themselves and treat others, and encouraging yourself and the community to aim higher. Your intent on inclusion may be the best in the world, but if you don't make it public, how could someone hold you accountable to it? Or dare to ask anyone for support?
Read more in Ashe Dryden's fantastic Code of Conduct 101.
Diversity is the full range of human and/or organizational differences and similarities e.g., values, beliefs, experiences, backgrounds. [1]
Incident is an event, happening or action that could be violating the Code of Conduct.
Inclusion is the act of intentionally creating an engaging, respectful, supportive, and empowering environment by engaging each other's strengths, experiences, and perspectives to achieve a common objective. [1]
Moment is a term that has been used in older versions of this document. It has been replaced by "initiative". [2]
There are numerous Code of Conducts published for all sorts of events. Some have been created by diligent community members, some with the help of lawyers, but the vast majority of them are copies and adaptions from existing ones. While using a common template and adapt it to your needs is the general recommendation, you will want to obey to some rules to avoid pitfalls:
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Stick to the license your template has been published under. If there's no license mentioned, don't use that Code of Conduct.
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Safe licenses to copy and adapt the Code of Conduct probably are, depending on how you use and license the Code of Conduct yourself: MIT License, CC BY, CC BY SA
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Try to find an alignemnt with any Code of Conduct or Business Conduct (and core values) of the company you drive this initiative for, if any.
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Use a current version. A template from 2012 is most likely replaced by a better enforceable version.
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tbd
Publishing the Code of Conduct is the first step in creating awareness for the topic of inclusion. Repeatedly pointing folks to the Code of Conduct during promotion of your event is a strong signal as well. Let people know they can expect a safe space and you will reach folks that wouldn't attend your event as they belong to a marginalized group and expect to be forgotten, left out and skipped. There's many legit reasons why members of marginalized groups feel uncomfortable.
Also consider publishing an Etiquette [3] and an Accessibility Statement [4].
Introducing and reminding your guests/your community of the Code of Conduct should be a prioritized talking point during welcoming. Also introduce the team and make clear that their efforts are solely to create a safe space for everyone.
The team should introduce themselves during events and at shift changing and let folks know about the Code of Conduct (re-paste/show/present/highlight shortlink) and how to reach them.
A reporting can be made available after the Moment to build trust and credibility in your community. Being open about incidents helps other organizers to scope the work for their Code of Conduct team.
Giving people various opportunities to report an incident is among the most crucial tasks. Incident reporting should be as friction free as possible, not adding up to the level of discomfort someone already experiences when talking about harassment.
Provide multiple clear ways to report an incident, personally and anonymously:
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face to face (for physical events only)
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email
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Twitter DMs
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phone
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messenger on the platform (if this is happening on e.g. FB you provide contacts on their messenger)
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neutral messengers (Signal, Telegram, etc)
Handling incidents is the toughest part of the job. There is not one way to handle all incidents, as incidents will differ a lot. If the incident appears tricky, consult the team and make the decision together.
Of utmost importance: The affected person has highest priority. Please make sure that their condition is taken care of. This is usually on the first-responder, but that person can and should ask for help in the team to ensure the affected person's needs are prioritized.
You may take action before logging the incident only if it's a minor incident, that you have identified yourself. For example a thoughtless comment on the chat that you as a team member identified.
As soon as there's another person involved, please log before you act.
When you log an incident to the agreed logging platform, please provide
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a screenshot (capture that immediately. Before everything else. First of all, literally.),
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a list of people involved,
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a short description of what happened, as factual as possible, including time & platform,
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if the issue could be resolved and
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what you need from other folks on the team to find a resolution.
When you log an incident, please remember
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to stay calm and factual.
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that this is not about you, what you experienced or who you are. It's easy to mix up emotions with facts in situations that are emotionally demanding. <3
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if you are targeted by a Code of Conduct violation, immediately involve another team member.
You are letting your team know the moment you log the incident. No matter how the incident reached you, please take what you have and inform the team on the platform you agreed on (e.g. a private Teams channel). Ask for help and tag people.
There's a wide range of options. Depending on the platform, you may or may not have the opportunity to act immediately. You will find a varied selection of platform examples and proposals on how to make use of these mechanisms in the appendix section Enforcement on Various Platforms.
TL;DR Find a solution with the affected person(s). If they can't feel safe, you will expel the aggressor from the event.
Everyone on the team should be taking care of the team. Being part of a Code of Conduct team is emotional labor. Being involved in an incident is emotional labor. Please respect that your team will process their involvement differently.
Your team should consist of at least three people or more depending on the projected workload. Why three? You should provide a minimum of diversity in the team itself, and that bare minimum is having a representation of your desired audience diversity (e.g. person of color / person identifying as female / person identifying as member of the LGBTQI+ community / person with a disability). This will mostly be a matter of availability, to be honest. By the way, there's nothing wrong with adding straight white abled mid-aged cis-men to the team. But only if they don't take up the space of a member of a marginalized group. You will need to add them on top. As space (budget constraints, seats, licenses) may be limited, your first choice to drop someone from the team will be the person who's adding the least diversity.
Also I recommend having at least one member external to your company and making this transparent to everyone. Again, this is structure for reducing barriers. If I was to report on inappropriate behavior of your CEO, for sure I wouldn't trust you. No matter how much empowerment you have from your CEO to approach them in case this happens, the reporting party will not know about this circumstance and probably pull back. Same applies to incidents with the organisers.
This question will come up: "What's our job?". Put together a guidance document in which you define the scope of work. This depends on the schedule, platform, type of event, number of attendees, number of sessions, distribution of audience and much more.
A sample guidance can be found here and in the appendix.
For internal communication use a platform that you trust.You should feel safe in regards to data safety and General Data Protection Rights (GDPR). You're going to discuss potentially highly sensitive topics in these chats. Make sure those protocols are stored in a safe place.
One possible scenario:
We've created a private team in Teams and also invited the external CoC team members. This Teams team has two channels, one called General for discussions and socializing in the Code of COnduct enforcement team, and one for logging incidents. This "Incident Report" channel is separated so we can have organisers or event owners in the General channel but not disclose any ongoing incident before we are clear on who is involved (might be organisers, staff, etc).
The full Code of Conduct Team should be listed on the Code of Conduct page and introduced live during the opening session.
The full team should be introduced with names including their pronouns and the languages they are familiar with. This introduction should be covered on
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the Code of Conduct page,
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the opening session,
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opportunities, where the Code of Conduct is referred to / link to the Code of Conduct is posted,
a. Beginning of sessions
b. Opening of social sessions (happy hour, networking)
c. Breaks,
d. Incidents.
What applies to our community approach applies to your Code of Conduct enforcement team as well: Make it a warm and safe place. I recommend to actively take care of each other. While this sounds natural, it might be unintentionally deprioritized in an incident situation. Make sure your team, especially the first-responders, have all they need from a mental care taking perspective.
Make it fun to be on the team, in a respectful way.
Diversity & Inclusion and the Code of Conduct team is essential to the success of an event, be it online or in person. The team should be treated as such when it comes to appreciation.
Make mentioning the Code of Conduct team in your reports a priority. Even if there has been nothing mentionable in their work (no incidents or only minor incidents), you should list the full team and give kudos the same way you give to speakers or co-organizers. BUT: keep away from picking one person or one incident for representing the work of the team or giving an example. This might boomerang back to individual people ("that person that gains their visibility through diversity topics") or a negative connotation of your event's success ("the event where this XYZ thing happened.")
Speaking of mental health, please make sure your team members are feeling well after a shift of duty, a day or a week later. Check in with them and see if they're ok. Offer to chat with them if you get aware of any ripple effects.
Regarding developing our work with Diversity & Inclusion we never stop learning. This also applies to the state of this document. If you can afford the time, please hold retrospective sessions and make a Pull Request to this document with all learnings.
Having an enforced Code of Conduct has public and business impact.
Public impact includes a general perception of inclusiveness, culture of caring and responsibility as well as an overall improved user experience.
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General perception of inclusiveness
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We're not leaving out anyone.
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We're creating a safe space. Not for some, but for all.
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Culture of caring
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We're not perfect but willing to improve. Fallibility is not a weakness, but a learning opportunity.
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We're dedicating time and space to listen to concerns.
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We're not expecting the worst, but are prepared to act in case.
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We understand that individual experience will differ.
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Responsibility
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We're open to feedback and ready to improve.
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Our industry and humanity demands allyship. We're showing up.
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If anyone is threatening the safe space we created, we will take action.
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User Experience
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The Code of Conduct team actively improves the user experience, as they report inaccessible or inappropriate elements, e.g. an online quiz that rewards attendees on a fast internet connection. This may happen before, during and after the initiative.
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The Code of Conduct team can be a consulting partner during the planning process and advise through their experience.
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More points to prove (work in progress)
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How having a CoC impacts publicly and privately the attendee experience. Eg If the attendees notice CoC is being enforced and they talk about it, is there any data of attendees leaving or staying silent/less engaged when CoC is not enforced.
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How having a CoC positively affects speakers, panel moderators, etc. Do they feel protected. What leading voices are more willing to deliver a talk or participate because they see the CoC is strong.
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How having a CoC supports organizers, so they are encouraged to engage in future editions because they feel protected and the CoC contributes to offer a quality experience, which also impacts that event's identity.
https://www.contributor-covenant.org/
https://berlincodeofconduct.org (available in many European languages)
https://hashtagcauseascene.com/code-of-conduct/
https://github.com/microsoft/virtual-events/blob/main/virtual-event-code-of-conduct.md
After the event you want to probably report back what has happened. Even if nothing happened, which is unlikely, to be honest.
Example email:
TL;DR We had a friendly audience. Only few things to mention. Recommendation is to keep this level of investment into Code of Conduct (CoC) work. We can still learn a lot.
Until now were 3 incidents that the team considered worth filing on our internal channel. None of them got reported to the platform (YouTube, dev.to) CoC teams. None of them was reported to us, but the CoC team identified them as issues that should be filed and communicted to the orga team. This was done today.
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The kahoot quiz was not inclusive to people on limited bandwidth. Lagging connections made it impossible for some to equally participate and have the same opportunity for winning a prize, that might be considered a monetary value e.g. to people searching for a job). We might want to reduce stress and provide more time or take out the "monetary" value.
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There was a group of people during the start of the workshop making fun of the trainers' appearance. This is considered aggressive behaviour, and although this might seem like a joking behaviour of a few that might even have a personal connection to the trainers, it also sets a tone in the chat that others might pick up and dynamics can become unpredictable. Mitigation was to remind people of the Code of Conduct link it and ask them for contenance. This resolved the issue.
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The workshop repo is using master as the main branch. The trainers used "master" (referring to the main branch) in their language while presenting. Nobody spoke up on this, but as this video stays online for a while, we recommend migrating the repo to use main instead of master and make a note of this in README.md. This also educates people on the current situation of unintentional racism in language. People who do the workshop later will se this issue mitigated.
Thanks for creating a wonderful event. And thanks to this "team formidable" for their Code of Conduct enforcement duty. ❤
Jan
[3] https://www.alterconf.com/code-of-conduct#etiquette
[4] Accessibility Statement
You can hide chat messages if you have been made a moderator for the channel. You may report the chat message and the user to the YouTube Platform team.
YouTube is one of the rougher places for inappropriate behavior, but also a very active channel that guarantees activity on the chat.
Is there a moderator role for Code of Conduct team members? Can I hide messages? Can I report chat messages without reporting the user? Can I ban users?
Periscope has limited moderation capabilities and you can only make use of them through the app. To provide the moderator role to someone, the two of you have to follow each other. Muting and blocking of users is possible then through the app only.
Teams Live Events provides moderated Q&A only. A member of the Code of Conduct team should be promoted to being a moderator on the Teams Live Event to look into content that might violate the Code of Conduct. An person external to the org owning the Live Event can't be promoted to moderator.
After you delete (not dismiss) a comment, it won't show up anywhere anymore. Be sure to make screenshots first.