October 2022 Code of Conduct Committee Case

News
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Hello all,

The conda Organization has had a Code of Conduct (CoC) for several years, but until this year the CoC was just a pointer to NumFOCUS’s Code of Conduct. We also did not have a conda CoC committee, and the CoC was not prominently featured in conda spaces.

This changed in July when an updated CoC and an initial conda CoC Committee was approved.

The updated CoC includes this statement (emphasis added):

All CoC cases will be reported to the community. The level of detail in reports will vary from case to case. Reports will describe at least the type of infraction that was reported, and the Committee’s decision and any action taken. In most cases, the report will not include personally identifiable information.

This post reports our first CoC case.

Timeline

A Code of Conduct incident report was submitted on September 30. The report linked to several recent online posts in a GitHub thread that the reporter felt were openly antagonistic to people in the thread and were contrary to the conda community’s Code of Conduct.

The CoC Committee reviewed these posts and reached out to the post’s author on October 3, seeking any input they might have. The author expressed in their response that they disregard the Code of Conduct and are unwilling to engage in any dialogue with the CoC committee regarding the matter. The author then made another post online that had a similar tone to the earlier posts.

Decision

The Code of Conduct starts with

Be kind to others. Do not insult or put down others.

It then expands on this in the Standards for Behavior section

Please always be kind and courteous. There’s never a need to be mean or rude or disrespectful. Thank you for helping make this a welcoming, friendly community for all.

Be empathetic, welcoming, friendly, and patient. We remember that the conda Organization is crafted by human beings who deserve to be treated with kindness and empathy. We work together to resolve conflict and assume good intentions. We may all experience some frustration from time to time, but we do not allow frustration to turn into a personal attack. A community where people feel uncomfortable or threatened is not a productive one.

Be careful in the words that we choose. We are careful and respectful in our communication and we take responsibility for our own speech. Be kind to others. Do not insult or put down other members of the community.

The CoC Committee reviewed these three posts and we found them to be in conflict with conda’s Code of Conduct. The posts are not respectful, are often not constructive, and sometimes veer into personal attacks. We also reviewed previous posts by the author in conda Organization spaces and found that this author has a long term pattern of disrespectful posts.

The conda Organization Code of Conduct Committee has banned the author from all conda Organization spaces for an extended period of time. This includes GitHub repos, chat rooms, online forums, in person and online events, and any other spaces under the conda Organization.

Closing thoughts

Every Code of Conduct case in some way reflects a failure. At minimum, it means that someone in the community has experienced or observed behavior that they believe should be reported. It often also means that someone in the community has violated our Code of Conduct.

However, Code of Conduct reports also reflect that the community is actively involved in establishing and maintaining a welcoming and harassment-free culture, and that community members care enough to file reports. These are huge strengths.

Not getting CoC incident reports might reflect that no violations are happening, but in a community the size of the conda community, it more likely means that community members do not feel that filing an incident report will result in any positive action. The fact that we received our first incident report a little over two months after the CoC was updated is an encouraging (albeit mixed) sign. It means people care, and that they believe reporting incidents is not pointless.

We can’t stop all CoC violations, but we can discourage many future ones by acting on ones that happen.

Thanks everyone,
Dave Clements, on behalf of the conda Organization Code of Conduct Committee

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I happen to know what this incident report is referring to as I was subscribed to the GitHub issue on which these comments were made. Are you intentionally not referencing the issue?

The respective comments were also not deleted, hidden or otherwise marked as violating the CoC. Would either of these be an appropriate action?

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Hi @frg,

Thanks for posting here. These are both great points. Here is my take on them.

I happen to know what this incident report is referring to as I was subscribed to the GitHub issue on which these comments were made. Are you intentionally not referencing the issue?

We discussed this. I argued against linking from here to the issue because to me that flirted with finger-pointing. The goal (in my brain) of this report is to highlight that these things happen, and that the conda community addresses them when they do. The details of the case seem less relevant than the big picture. But I am not 100% (or even 75%) sure of this point of view. Also, it’s not that hard to find the offending thread, so I am even less sure that not linking will have the effect that I argued for. Pointing to the thread would give people specific examples of what is not acceptable behavior. The committee will reconsider this this week.

The respective comments were also not deleted, hidden or otherwise marked as violating the CoC. Would either of these be an appropriate action?

Speaking for me only, I did think about deleting the posts, but I decided not to propose this. Other projects have not deleted some of the user’s posts and that was helpful to us. I did not think about marking the individual posts as violating the CoC. I’ll propose that this week, and I would expect that to happen. On Friday we did add a summary to the thread that points to this report.

@frg, thanks again for posting. We struggle to find the right balance here. Thanks for helping us work that out. And please post a response if you have anything else you want to share.

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Hi @frg, all,

The Code of Conduct committee discussed both of your suggestions and we have implemented both.

  • The original announcement above has been updated to point to the reported thread.
  • The reported posts in that thread have now been hidden. This means people can still see them, but they have to take extra action to do that.

Thanks again for your suggestions.
Dave C, on behalf of the conda Code of Conduct Committee

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