Codes of conduct

Far from legal boilerplate, we must celebrate codes of conduct in our organizations. Feature them prominently, discuss them with the team. Your systematic showcasing of institutional values shapes both ethics and outcomes. It's not enough for principals to merely exercise good conduct in trying situations, we must actively preach it beforehand. The alternative is factious tribalism, selective enforcement, and organizational rot.

Three of them, read side by side

In 2017 I collected three public codes of conduct and wrote down what I thought of each. The full text of each one lives with the organisation that wrote it; what follows is only my reading.

Papers We Love. More common-sense oriented. Less stringent, and less exhaustive than others.

PyCon. The main code of conduct is surprisingly brief, given the 2013 incident. Big plus here is the provision of very detailed public incident handling procedures.

Geek Feminism Wiki. One of the most thorough and progressive public policies. Good resources, sample documents, and recommendations upon which others are encouraged to base their policies.

The generator

In 2017 I also built a code-of-conduct generator: a form that asks what kind of organisation you are and what you want covered, and writes both a footer-sized synopsis and a handbook-length policy as you answer. It has not been touched since 2021 and it still runs, untouched, at dnorman.github.io/code-of-conduct-generator.

I gave a talk on this at 0111Conf in 2017; the slides are in the talks index.