Why your user community needs a Code of Conduct

Within Open Source communities over the past few years, great strides forward have been made in ensuring that that diversity is respected and encouraged. It's now much more likely that inappropriate behaviour is defined, reported, and eliminated.

In my current work as Community Adviser for Totara Learning, I'm helping with their strategy to migrate the community forums from an instance of Totara Learn to Totara Social. While there have been no specific issues thus far with their community forums for partners, subscribers, and the public, the migration marks a good opportunity to review the policies that are in place, and to create new ones.

While any site provided by a commercial organisations needs to have a Privacy Policy and Terms of Use, it's important that community sites have a Code of Conduct. This document is ideally relatively short, and should be much more readable than the kind of legalese that haunts other policies.

A Code of Conduct, with clear guidelines and ways to report violations, sends a clear signal to current and potential members that this is a community focused on respectful, professional dialogue. It provides something objective for members to point to in case of any conflicts, and a clear workflow if an incident needs to be reported.

Even if you're reading this and thinking everything is fine in your community, it's clear that we can never be fully aware of the nuances of the multitudes of interactions that take place. We're all subject to the 'unknown unknowns' famously pointed out by Donald Rumsfeld. Who knows if there are people put off joining your community because of what they see? What if your forums are implicated in a wider issue that a member has with another individual?

As a McKinsey report shows, more diverse organisations fare better - and the same is true of their user communities. In short, your community needs a Code of Conduct.

What should go in a Code of Conduct?

While there are (excellent) templated approaches to defining a Code of Conduct, there remains real value in thinking it through in your specific context. It's worth looking at the Ada Initiative's useful guide to designing a Code of Conduct, which asks questions such as:

• Who adopts and enforces your community code of conduct? 
• What are the consequences for violating your code of conduct?
• Who decides what actually violates the code of conduct?

Just like contracts and service-level agreements, a Code of Conduct is most important not when everything is going well, but when things go wrong. It's best to specify in advance what happens next, rather than wait until you have issues.

In the background research we did for Totara's draft Code of Conduct, we found these openly-licensed documents very good starting points:

• Citizen Code of Conduct
• Contributor Covenant
• Mozilla Community Participation Guidelines
• Open Source Initiative General Code of Conduct
• Recurse Center Code of Conduct
• Ubuntu Code of Conduct v2.0

It's no accident that the communities these documents underpin are some of the most welcoming places to contribute and interact on the internet. It's worth remembering that, if your user community is publicly-readable, your audience is much bigger than the number of registered users you have. Our perception of brands is affected by what they push out to the world through advertising and their official media channels, but judgements are also made, either consciously or unconsciously, as to what they allow within their community spaces.

Some advice

We want to share details of the Code of Conduct with the Totara Community before posting it more widely, but here are the headings and sub-headings we decided to use. Again, these were very much influenced by the excellent work with the Open Source community.

• Introduction - why are you introducing the Code of Conduct? Why now?
• Scope - in which situations does this apply? (e.g. does it apply to any face-to-face events you run, too?)
• Expected behaviour - if there are going to be consequences for inappropriate behaviour, you should also specify appropriate behaviour (e.g. we have sub-headings such as 'Respect' and 'Inclusivity')
• Behaviour that will not be tolerated - this is the list that you will refer to if you have to sanction a member of your community (e.g. 'discrimination based on gender, race, nationality, sexuality, religion, age or physical disability')
• Consequences - what will happen as a result of a report of inappropriate behaviour? (e.g. public warning, investigation by staff, temporary/permanent ban)
• How to report an incident - what steps should an community member take if they experience or witness a violation of the Code of Conduct? How do they know they will be protected (e.g. provide an email address specifically for this purpose, make assurances around confidentiality)
• Attribution and acknowledgements - are you building upon the work of others? Then say so! Also allow others to use your Code of Conduct as a starting point (e.g. cite your sources, and choose a Creative Commons license to allow your work to be remixed)

Final words

It's easy to make cookie-cutter policy documents and take a lazy find-and-replace approach to creating a Code of Conduct. However, I'd encourage you to take the creation of a Code of Conduct as an opportunity to think carefully in terms of the type of community interaction you want to foster.

The next steps for Totara's draft Code of Conduct is for it to be introduced to the community as part of the beta testing of the new Community site. We're looking forward to the feedback of members, and making the document even better!