Co-designing a Code of Conduct

Over the last few months, as part of the development of a community-led governance system for COPIM (and/or the various infrastructures, models, and services that we are building under the COPIM umbrella), we have, as a project, been co-designing a Code of Conduct (CoC), which has been published today in a first release. The COPIM CoC supports the work we are doing together as a project (through our events, projects, and communications) and with our wider community, to create a friendly and respectful place for sharing and exchange and to ensure everyone feels confident to be involved in the development of our programs and initiatives.

In designing this CoC, we have taken inspiration from the experience of like-minded open source community-led groups and organisations, from the Ada Initiative and The Carpentries to the Contributors Covenant and Wikimedia, all of which have previously developed Code of Conducts and have in some cases also published their process of developing guidelines online, sharing best practices and how-to documents.

COPIM’s CoC has been based on different elements and remixes of existing CoCs (a full list of the CoCs we adapted and consulted is included at the bottom of our CoC). Following consultation with the wider project group, COPIM’s Governance Team (WP4) have created a first draft of the CoC, which has subsequently been developed further by the project members in a process of co-design culminating in its first release today.

Similar to many of our project documents and outputs, this CoC is also a processual document, which we might update as the project changes or our community grows, or as we start to work with and apply the CoC in practice, to fine-tune how it works best for us as a project and to make sure it continues to work for us and our community in the future.

As always, we are keen to receive feedback and our Code of Conduct is open for comments from stakeholders and the wider COPIM community which I hope we can respond to or incorporate in future versions.

Photo by David Pisnoy on Unsplash