Welcome to Coding Standards

Last week, people in my wider professional circle had a little Internet explosion in response to a message sent to NICAR-L, an important and popular professional email list. (You can read it here if you register for the list. Honestly though, you’ve probably seen this kind of thing before.)

I’ve had some practice dealing with situations like this and I’ve been thinking about what goes into a good code of conduct. Here’s what I’ve got:

Define the community and environment:

• Mission and goals for the space.
• Where and when the code is in effect.

Set expectations:

• Types of interaction that are healthy and encouraged.
• Types of interaction that are unacceptable.
• Levels of response.

Develop a reporting process:

• Safe ways to report incidents.
• Reporting back to the community about how incidents were handled.

Develop a response process:

• A diverse and representative group of trustworthy people to handle enforcement.
• Tools for de-escalating and stopping incidents.
• A response process for serious incidents.

Software developers have coding standards that help avoid common mistakes and response protocols for catastrophic problems. Journalists have professional ethics that help reporters practice the craft with integrity and deal with those who don’t.

The spaces where we work together, ask questions, support each other and debate important topics need similar codes.

How many people saw the blow-up on NICAR-L and thought “welp, that’s why I shouldn’t post anything” or simply unsubscribed? That doesn’t have to happen. But it will happen without tools to prevent it.

A good code of conduct isn’t about policing thought or suppressing debate. A good code gives your community tools for reducing harm, making sure harms don’t accumulate, and dealing with the really traumatic situations. It’s about giving people a fair shake — even the people with crazy ideas, because at the end of the day, that’s all of us. It’s about re-writing the unwritten rules that alienate and drive away good people into common ground for healthy and productive interactions.

In the coming weeks, I’ll expand on the points above. I’ll draw on my experience at FreeGeek Chicago, a radically inclusive space where I helped develop a Code of Conduct and helped enforce it for almost a decade.

I’m going to tell some stories, and that’s going to be hard. I saw everything from ignorant comments to physical violence at FreeGeek. I’m proud of how we handled these situations and how hard we worked for restorative justice. But these are tough situations without easy answers and often bittersweet endings. As my friend Jamie Kalven says, there are large acts of violence but only small acts of healing.

Sometimes people are going to be behave poorly towards each other. Is your community ready to deal with it?