Code of Conduct Enforcement Process

Who this is for

This document is primarily written to help the leaders of our community with Code of Conduct (CoC) enforcement and handling Code of Conduct violations.

Goals of CoC enforcement

Code of Conduct enforcement has two goals.

1. The primary goal is to protect our community and individuals in it.
2. A secondary, but important, goal is to create a healthy community where individuals can grow.

If the two goals conflict, then you need to take care of the primary goal first.

This means that, in some uncommon cases, strong measures are necessary to protect the community from individuals that show toxic or harmful behavior. Physical or verbal abuse and serious transgressive behavior that makes people feel unsafe should be dealt with quickly and strongly, in order to protect our community. In such a case, the intention of the person committing the violation is less important. Well-intentioned but very unsafe behavior cannot be tolerated, and we are not the right environment to coach individuals to stop this behavior. Removing these individuals from our community is the right action.

Less dangerous, but still problematic behavior can be used as a teaching moment instead. This category of behavior is much more common and always stems out of incompetence instead of malicious intent. We are a very diverse community in all aspects of this word, and this means that people might not be used to our way of communicating. Some of our members have little experience with professional communication and not everyone is used to our communication style. Coaching these people to be better is often a much better approach than punishing them or removing them from our community. This can include giving people clear feedback when their behavior has crossed a line or is close to crossing a line. This can also take the form of explaining how our community works, and the kind of communication style we want.

Because safety is the primary goal, there are serious limits to how much coaching we can do. This also means no-one is entitled to being coached. When coaching might take too much time, when individuals don’t improve enough, or when leadership has too many other responsibilities, they are free to opt for stronger measures instead, because the safety of our community is the most important goal.

Finally, previous mistakes in Code of Conduct enforcement or in leadership should not keep you from taking action. For example, an enforcement decision should not take into account whether a CoC violation might have been prevented by better enforcement in the past. You need to protect the community, even if the issue was made worse by bad leadership decisions in the past. Similarly, if leadership previously decided not to take action on a CoC violation, they can later still decide to do so to prevent further harm.

This approach gives leadership broad authority to enforce the code of conduct, which is needed to protect the community. If someone feels that leadership is misusing this authority, they should escalate to either the community council or the SABDFL.

Who enforces the Code of Conduct

Code of Conduct enforcement is the responsibility of the Community Council. They delegate some of this work to other senior leadership bodies and moderators.

• Moderators and Operators are responsible for low-level enforcement on their specific platforms. For serious cases or behavior that goes beyond a single platform, the moderators should inform the Community Council and ask for their guidance.
• Some leadership positions also have delegated authority to enforce the code of conduct. However, they should always check with the Community Council before taking permanent action. These include the LoCo council, Flavor councils, and the leadership teams of conferences and Local Communities. While they can take temporary measures to protect the safety of their communities, they should always inform the community council and ask for their guidance.

Process

This process starts when you either see or get notified of a CoC violation.

It’s important to do your investigation as quietly as possible. It’s best to discuss CoC violations with as few people as possible. Moreover, try to make it as clear as possible to everyone involved that they should not share any information outside. They should not even share the fact that an investigation is happening.

The process is the following.

1. Make an initial decision whether strong, immediate action is needed. Check if people’s safety is in danger, or if a violation is so egregious that it needs immediate action. Note that this is rarely the case.

2. If this is the case, then decide on a temporary action as soon as possible to prevent further harm. After you’ve taken this action, you can continue with the rest of the process to possibly make that action permanent or to revert it.

3. Gather evidence about violations. Try to do this as quietly as possible.

4. One important source of evidence is the person making the complaint. Ask them for screenshots, links to public messages, forward emails etc. Also ask them if there are other people that might be able to provide more information.

5. Talk to people involved to get confirmation about the behavior.

6. Decide on a soft or a hard approach.

7. A soft approach is the most common. It means talking to the individual, making it clear that their behavior is not up to expectations, and being as clear as possible about how their behavior should change. This often includes an informal warning from the leadership team. leaders. The goal here is to change the behaviour of the individual to ensure they become a supportive member of our community.

8. A hard approach might be needed in rare cases. It means banning the individual from our platforms, stripping their membership, or removing them from leadership positions. This can be done either for a limited period or indefinitely. The goal here is to protect our community and to ensure this person’s behavior is not affiliated with our project.

Note: we generally do not communicate to the outside about code of conduct enforcement. As an exception to this, when somebody appeals a previous enforcement action against them, we can let them know whether that appeal was successful.

Guidance on misuse of the Code of Conduct

The goal of our Code of Conduct is to create a safe, welcoming and diverse community. Some people will try to use the Code of Conduct to their advantage, which is always a red flag. This can take a lot of forms.

• Rule-lawyering. Some people will read the code of conduct as a legal document and will try to argue that certain behavior is acceptable according to the code of conduct, even when that behavior is creating an unwelcoming or hostile environment. This is sometimes referred to as “using a loophole”. When evaluating certain behavior, it’s much more important to think about how this behavior will impact our community. The code of conduct describes what kind of community we want to be, and behavior should be evaluated on whether it helps us get there.
• Using the CoC like a stick. Some people will use the CoC to settle disagreements. This can include threatening to report someone, or writing long public posts about how someone’s behavior is against the Code of Conduct. There is no issue in people reporting a Code of Conduct violation, or people questioning whether certain behavior violates the Code of Conduct. But these questions and reports should be addressed to the community council or leadership privately, without the subject knowing about this. The only people who have the authority to enforce the code of conduct have an explicit mandate from the community council.

Guidance on the technicalities of a ban

If someone is banned from the Ubuntu project, the following guidelines are typically applied.

• The Community Council should coordinate with the appropriate bodies in order to ensure that the banned person loses access to Ubuntu systems just before they are notified of the ban. This is in order to prevent the banned person from using their privileges to retaliate.
• At the moment of the ban, the Launchpad account of the person is disabled, but this is only a temporary measure. Launchpad is an important project for many other communities, so a ban in Ubuntu should not equate to a ban in Launchpad. After the account is disabled, the appropriate bodies should remove all Ubuntu-specific privileges from the Launchpad account, and afterwards re-enable the account.
• If the ban is temporary, and the person wishes to rejoin our community after the ban ends, they do not automatically get their privileges and appointments back. Instead, they are free to (re)apply for things such as Ubuntu Membership using the regular procedures. During the application process, boards are free to take into account contributions from before the ban and previously held positions. These contributions are still valued and the ban does not change this fact.

Which behavior falls under the Ubuntu Code of Conduct?

From the Code of Conduct itself.

“The Code of Conduct governs how we behave in public or in private whenever the project will be judged by our actions. We expect it to be honoured by everyone who represents the project officially or informally, claims affiliation with the project, or participates directly.”

According to this, the code of conduct applies to two kinds of behaviors.

Ubuntu community members participating in other communities.

This is a bit fluid and broad. Ubuntu community members have to adhere to the Code of Conduct when “the project will be judged by our actions”. This is quite broad for a reason. The nature of open source software is highly collaborative and fluid. For example, Ubuntu developers spend a lot of their time developing software in upstream communities such as Gnome and Debian. This means there are no clear boundaries between work “inside” or “outside” of the Ubuntu community.

To make this more concrete, here are a few examples.

• The CoC also applies to unofficial parts of community events such as evening dinner with participants or an impromptu tour of the hosting city. Such events are an important part of our community and our community is judged by whether people feel welcome and safe at such events.

• The CoC still applies to Ubuntu community members attending other open source conferences. This is because they act as ambassadors or representatives of the project, even if they are not explicitly intending to. People naturally judge projects based on the interactions they have with people from those projects, even if those interactions happen in other places.

• The CoC still applies to personal blogs of Ubuntu community members. Even when the blog has nothing to do with Ubuntu itself, people will judge the project based on the behavior of its members.

Anyone participating in our community.

This one is more clear, but also requires some explanation. This means that anyone participating in our community should follow the code of conduct during that participation. However, this also means that people might be denied access to our community based on past actions outside of it.

The goal of the code of conduct is to create a welcoming, safe, and diverse community. This is only possible if we keep out people that would make our community unwelcoming, unsafe, or work against diversity. To achieve this, we might block people from participating if the past behavior of those people is incompatible with our values. Creating a welcoming community means shunning people who would make it an unwelcome place.