Raku Code of Conduct

The Raku community is committed to providing a welcoming, inclusive, safe, and enjoyable environment for everyone. In fact, we have a term for a “welcoming, inclusive, safe, and enjoyable for all”: we say that the Raku community should be “optimized for fun” – or, in short form, “-Ofun”. Using that terminology, we are committed to ensuring that the Raku community is -Ofun for everyone, regardless of level of experience, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, neurodiversity, personal appearance, body size, race, ethnicity, age, religion, nationality, or other similar characteristic.

Many people have eloquently described the -Ofun community culture to which we aspire. In the interest of clarity and concision, this document does not do so; instead, it provides a short, readable list of unacceptable behaviors so that we’re all on the same page about the ground rules in our particular community.

The purpose of this CoC is exclusively to ensure that the Raku community is -Ofun (welcoming, inclusive, safe, and enjoyable for all). This CoC is not designed to punish wrongdoers, mediate arguments, or improve the morality of community members. Those goals may be worthy but are outside the scope of this document.

Unacceptable Behaviors

The following behaviors, in no particular order, are unacceptable and violate the Code of Conduct.

• Using sexist, racist, homophobic, transphobic, ableist, or otherwise discriminatory language (including repeated/deliberate misgendering or deadnaming).
• Using insults, profanity targeting a person, personal or political attacks, or other gratuitously hurtful language (if in doubt, criticize ideas or behavior instead of people).
• Repeatedly involving someone in a conversation or topic (for example, by sending them emails or chat notifications) despite their objection.
• Continuing or repeatedly starting a conversation in an inappropriate venue (for example, debating the merits of a Code of Conduct violation in the general #raku IRC channel rather than in the appropriate GitHub issue or repeated off-topic conversations in #raku-dev).
• Posting or displaying sexually explicit or graphically violent images or using sexually explicit language or excessive profanity.
• Making inappropriate sexual advances.
• Stalking (online or in person) or inappropriate photography/recording.
• Revealing, or threatening to reveal, someone’s contact information or other non-public data (“doxing”) or sharing private content, such as non-public emails or channel history from unlogged IRC channels, without consent.
• Any public or private harassment.
• Refusing to agree to follow the existing CoC (arguing that the CoC should be changed is fine when done in an appropriate venue; refusing to follow the existing CoC is not).
• Falsely reporting a CoC violation in bad faith.

Non Defenses

The following “justifications” do not excuse violating the Code of Conduct:

• “They started it”: When someone violates the CoC, speaking to them about their behavior or reporting the behavior may be appropriate, depending on the circumstances. However, no circumstances justify responding in a way that itself violates the CoC. It is entirely possible for multiple people in a conversation to violate the CoC; one person’s CoC violations in no way offset the other’s.
• “I didn’t mean to”: Intent may be relevant to determining the severity of a CoC violation – malicious intent certainly makes harmful conduct worse. But intent is typically not relevant to determining whether conduct violates the CoC. Instead, whether behavior violates the CoC is determined entirely by the impact that behavior had (and could be reasonably expected to have had). Good intent does not excuse harmful impact.
• “It’s free speech”: A huge number of statements are both lawful and totally unwelcome in the Raku community; speech laws of any jurisdiction are entirely irrelevant to determining whether particular conduct violates the CoC.
• “It’s just a tone issue”: In some communities, ideas are the only thing that matters – if the substance of an idea is correct, then the way that idea is expressed is irrelevant. The Raku community is not like that. In the Raku community, tone matters: forceful criticism of someone’s ideas or behavior can be perfectly in keeping with the CoC if expressed one way; the same ideas, expressed as a personal attack, would violate the CoC.
• “That doesn’t count because it was on a personal blog”: As explained below, personal blogs, social media profiles, and similar spaces are not covered by the CoC; however, the Raku community can still respond to content or behavior in those spaces if that content/behavior makes complying with the CoC in Raku spaces unlikely or impossible. This is because enforcing the CoC is never a punitive act; it is always about ensuring that the Raku community is -Ofun. For instance, the Raku community would be neither inclusive nor enjoyable if it welcomed people who post racist screeds to their personal sites, no matter how assiduously they attempted to separate those statements from their Raku activities.
• “You’ll never prove it”: The CoC is not a code of law, and enforcing it does not require proving that any particular violation definitely took place (much less proving it by the standards of a criminal court). All it requires is that the response to an incident help make the Raku community -Ofun.

Covered Spaces

This CoC applies to the #raku, #raku-dev, and #moarvm IRC channels; the GitHub repositories under the Raku, Rakudo, and MoarVM organizations; the perl6/Raku mailing lists; the Raku Discord channel; the r/rakulang subreddit; Rakudo Weekly News; Planet Raku blogs; the Raku dev.to organization; the Rakulang YouTube channel; the rakulang@fosstodon.org Mastodon account; and any other digital spaces Raku may establish. It also applies to all official Raku conferences and events, physical or digital.

Modification

The Raku Steering Council may revise this CoC by majority vote. Any revisions will have purely prospective effect.

Enforcement

The CoC will be enforced by the Community Affairs Team (excluding any recused members) as described in the CoC Incident Response Guide. The CAT will make every effort to respond within 72 hours of receiving a report; if a violation occurred, the CAT may respond by a range of actions from informally discussing the incident with the violator to permanently banning the violator from Raku community spaces and recommending that the Raku Steering Council eject them from the core team. Please see the CoC Incident Response Guide for details.

Reporting Violations

If you were subject to or witnessed a CoC violation, you should report it to CAT@raku.org. Alternatively, you can report a violation to any member of the CAT, who will forward it to all non-recused members of the CAT. Please be aware that, while the CAT will make all reasonable efforts not to disclose the identity of individuals who report violations, it cannot guarantee reporter anonymity nor do reporters have a way to lessen or otherwise alter the action the CAT takes based on a report.

Credits & Sources

This CoC draws heavily on the ideas in the book How to Respond to Code of Conduct Reports and sources cited in that book (especially How “Good Intent” Undermines Diversity and Inclusion and No More Rock Stars: How to Stop Abuse in Tech Communities).

Additionally, this CoC was inspired by/was written with reference to the following codes of conduct: Apache Code of Conduct, Citizen Code of Conduct, Code for America’s Code of Conduct, Conference in the Cloud – Standards of Conduct, Conference in the Cloud – Handling Standards of Conduct Incidents, Contributor Covenant, Django Code of Conduct, Explorations in RL 2019 Code of Conduct, Geek Feminism Code of Conduct, Geek Feminism Community Anti-Harassment Policy, Mozilla Community Participation Guidelines, Python Community Code of Conduct, Rust Code of Conduct, StackOverflow Code of Conduct, and The Technology Transformation Service Code of Conduct.