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GNOME Code of Conduct committee guidelines for handling incidents

The audience for this document is the GNOME Code of Conduct committee. The goal is to document the necessary steps for handling incidents that have been reported.

Discussing a report

Meetings to discuss reports should be held as soon as possible. If the incident requires an immediate response, the meeting should be held within 24 hours of receiving the report. If the incident is not urgent, the meeting should be scheduled within one week of receiving the report.

Only members of the committee should be present at the meeting. At least half of the committee must be in attendance in order to determine consequences and a behavioral modification plan.

The current status of all reports should be documented. This includes documenting email and verbal conversations as they occur. A designated committee member will document committee meeting notes, the committee's report evaluation, and what behavioral modification plan and consequences are decided on. The committee member who follows up with the reported person will document their response.

Follow up meetings may need to be scheduled to review additional information, decide additional consequences based on the reported person's response, or to review an appeal.

Evaluating a report

Jurisdiction

impact-vs-risk-matrix.png

Impact vs risk matrix is CC-BY-SA 3.0 Safety First PDX and Otter Tech

Law enforcement

Offences should not be reported on behalf of a victim and situations where law officials might solicit such a report should be avoided. The organization should not unnecessarily expose a victim to a process that exposes them or might cause other unwanted collateral damage (e.g. further harassment, emotional stress, …).

If everyone is presently physically safe, involve law enforcement or security only at a victim's request. (In many cases, reporting harassment to law enforcement is very unpleasant and may result in further harassment.)

Note that there may be cases where the organization is legally obliged to contact law enforcement even if the victim does not want to follow up.

You can provide a list of emergency contacts and say something like "if you want any help reporting this incident, please let us know" and leave it at that.

Potential consequences

What follows are examples of possible responses to an incident report. This list is not inclusive, and the GNOME Code of Conduct committee reserves the right to take any action it deems necessary. Possible responses to an incident include:

Talking to a reported person

When talking to a person who was reported, discuss the incident in terms of their behavior, its impact, and a behavioral modification plan.

Example:

If the reported person wants to apologize, tell them that you will relay their apology, but that they should not contact the reporter. Apologies often center the hurt feelings of the reported person and put the reporter in the awkward position of having to forgive the person. As an incident responder, you can choose to relay the reported person's apology, or you can choose not to if it is not genuine.

Sometimes a reported person does not understand why their behavior was inappropriate, or they will not agree to the behavioral modification plan. If this happens, there may be a risk of the inappropriate behavior repeating. You may need to respond with a more severe consequence than a warning, such as removal from an event or a temporary ban from an online community. Talk with your Code of Conduct committee before hand to determine what response to take if the person does not agree to the behavioral modification plan.

No Forced Apologies

Do not ask for the reported person to make an apology to the reporter, third party witnesses, or other people who were impacted by their behavior. Committee members have no responsibility to enforce friendship or reconciliation. The committee's goal is to stop the inappropriate behavior.

Forcing an apology can cause the impacted person additional distress or trauma. It forces further contact with the reported person, which can cause the impacted person to feel unsafe or impact their mental health. It also creates a social expectation that the impacted person will accept the apology, forgive the reported person, and return their social connection to its previous status.

If the reported person offers to apologize to the impacted people (especially in person), discourage it. Say, "I accept your apology on behalf of (the impacted people)."

If a committee member relays an apology to the impacted people, it should be brief and not require a response. "(The reported person) apologizes and agrees to have no further contact with you" is brief. "(The reported person) is very sorry that their attempts to woo you were not received in the manner that was intended and will try to do better next time, they're really really sorry and hope that you can find it in your heart to forgive them" is emphatically not.

If the reported person recognizes that their behavior was inappropriate, note that in the relayed apology. If the reported person does not recognize their behavior was inappropriate, do not relay the apology, as it is not genuine.

Tell the reported person they are not to further discuss the incident with the impacted people. If the reported person attempts to press an apology on someone who would clearly prefer to avoid them, or attempts to recruit others to relay messages on their behalf, this may constitute continued violation of the Code of Conduct.

Following up with reporters

Reporters should receive an acknowledgment of their report within 24 hours. Follow up on a report should be completed within 1 week.

When a report comes in via email:

After you have talked to the reported person, follow up with the reporter. You can talk to them in person or send them an email.

If the report was determined to be a Code of Conduct violation, follow up with the reporter to:

If the report was determined not to be a Code of Conduct violation, follow up with the reporter to:

If handling the report takes longer than 1 week, then the committee will need to send an update to the reporter:

The committee should send an email acknowledging emailed reports or reports via web form within 24 hours. Reporters should receive an email back with the committee’s decisions and actions taken within 1 week. If deliberations are taking longer than a week, you should email the reporter letting them know that the report will take more time to handle.

Public Responses

Some incidents require a public response after the incident in order to protect the GNOME community. Reasons that you might decide to communicate an incident or enforcement decision with the community include:

Be prepared and willing to distance your community from actions of participants that reflect badly on the GNOME community, and to defend your action or inaction in response.

Try to respond quickly to incidents. A late response looks a lot like no response at all and can harm the GNOME community's reputation. Use a simple general statement about the kind of behavior involved.

For example: "$COMMUNITY does not condone $BEHAVIOR. $BEHAVIOR violates the GNOME Code of Conduct. We take harassment seriously and respond to reports of it quickly and firmly."

If the incident has been dealt with at the event, it may be appropriate to make a short announcement at the next plenary, something like: "$thing happened. This was a violation of our policy. We apologize for this. We have taken $action. This is a good time for all attendees to review our policy at $location. If anyone would like to discuss this further they can $contact_us_somehow."

Employer Reports

Please consult with the GNOME Foundation board and/or GNOME lawyers before making a report to someone's employer. If approved, it may be appropriate to provide a short report of someone's conduct to their employer. This may be appropriate if someone is working in an official employee capacity.

An incident may be reported to an employer if the incident occurred while the reported person was:

Talking about their employer's product Staffing a sponsor booth at a GNOME event Answering questions about their employer in the GNOME online community Attempting to recruit someone to work for the employer Claiming to represent their employer's views Working as paid staff for the GNOME Foundation, whether as event staff, online moderators, or contributors

Attribution

The GNOME Code of Conduct committee guidelines was forked from the Code of Conduct template, which was created by Otter Tech and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License

Additional language and graphics were incorporated and modified from the following resources:


2024-10-23 11:07