Standards of Participation

This document outlines the standards for participating in KIBI community spaces (including those on GitHub: Issues, Pull Requests, Discussions, etc) and remaining in good standing with the scene. It is descriptive, not prescriptive, and provided for your information only, which is to say:

1. If you get cancelled for violating these Standards, you can’t say nobody warned you.

2. If you think somebody else is violating these Standards, too bad! You can’t use them as a punitive resource (any more than you can use an encyclopedia as a punitive resource against lying).

The goal of this file is not to create an illusory notion of accountability out of thin air—it is to document the current state of the community so that there aren’t any surprises for people new to the scene.

If you were linked to this file, it is probably because you were hanging out on a repository owned by kibigo!. As the current maintainer of said repository, she has complete authority on what does or doesn’t fly there. This will continue to be the case until such a time as a group of people can successfully organize to wrest power from her, or else one (1) white cisbro makes a fork.

To maintain good standing in this community, it is expected that you share a set of commonly‐held principles.

These principles include:

1. Recognizing the value and worth in non‐European languages, including the value of being able to write programs in the language that one natively speaks, the importance of internationalization and Unicode support, and the different perspectives that various non‐European languages and cultures bring to the table. It is expected that you have spent more than zero hours consuming media created by someone who spoke a non‐European language, and preferred that you have spent more than zero hours trying to learn a non‐European language yourself.

2. Recognizing the scope of human gender as something large and nuanced, and definitely not binary or anything approaching it. If you use this software to generate a form with checkboxes of ‹ ☐ Male  ☐ Female  ☐ Other › then you should expect people here to get upset about that.

3. Respecting the Amateur, meaning approaching others (including the developers) in a way which will uplift them and their craft, and also respecting the Amateur in yourself, which is to say, being open to mistakes and eager to learn. This is not professional software, this is not a professional space, and your professional standards mean nothing here.

4. Valuing the agency of other people and not attempting to harm or manipulate them to get what you want.

5. Valuing the work which is being done here, or else gtfo.

The following are non‐principles of this community:

• Freedom of speech. If you perpetuate falsehoods, you will get called out for perpetuating falsehoods. If you say things which are harmful or bad, you will not be allowed to say things in the future.

• Political correctness. You can say “fuck”, you can say “ACAB”, you’re allowed to get upset. If you’re a dyke, you can call yourself a dyke. The politically‐correct words are often the wrong ones, and we want you to do what feels right.

• Merchantability. This community is not interested in making sellable code or code which is easy to use in sellable products. We are doing this work because we value it and think it is important.

Thank you and have fun!