Open sourcing the Clef handbook
Our work to raise the baseline for inclusive policies at early stage companies
At Clef we’re working to build an inclusive company with a value-driven culture. That’s an easy thing to want and say, but it’s difficult to practice because exclusion is the default in our industry. It takes active effort to find the hidden biases in our companies and remove them.
As we started growing our team this year, we looked for a starter-kit of inclusive policies. A lot of great work is being done to discuss cultural problems and their solutions, but it’s scattered around the web and very little is written in the form of policy.
We wanted to put those learnings into practice, so we decided to write our own handbook and today we’re open sourcing it.
You can see the handbook, which contains all of the policies we use at Clef, on Github at github.com/clef/handbook. It represents many hours of research, lots of thoughtful debates, some serious introspection, and a lot of feedback from experts. It’s certainly not perfect, but we think it’s an exciting place to start.
We’re hoping for two outcomes from open sourcing these policies:
First, we’re excited to get more perspectives on creating inclusive policies to help us run our companies better and make our communities safer.
And second, we hope that other organizations will work with our research and the conversations that ensue to make their own policies more inclusive.
Building a company is hard. Building a company that prioritizes inclusion in an industry that doesn’t is even harder. Both this handbook and our company are a long way from perfect, but this is a start. One of our values is to be better today than yesterday, and we’re excited to have help making this core part of our company better.
If you want to contribute, open a pull request or come work with us.
