coreboot Code of Conduct

coreboot has grown and matured a lot in the last few years and we have many new contributors and users. This growth has been something I have been thinking about for some time. I often ask myself what makes a good community? How does our community grow and flourish? How do we get new contributors and new students for GSOC. How can I contribute to growing our community?  These questions were on my mind as I attended the GSOC reunion in San Jose last fall and again later at the coreboot meetup in Prague. Discussions at both events helped shape my ideas, but GSOC reunion had some key elements to shaping a good community.

A reoccurring topic at GSOC gatherings is how to  expand project communities, keeping students engaged after GSOC, and how to get new students and contributors involved with projects. Normally, these discussions are among mentors, who are well entrenched in the FLOSS culture, are experienced developers, and have developed strong relationships within their project. Unlike previous mentor summits, the GSOC reunion was open to past students and mentors to attend, which brought a different perspective. Many of the students  were not involved in the projects after GSOC and we wanted to know why. This was an opportunity to hear from students about what worked for them and what didn’t work. Most of the students I met still used lots of open source software, but there were a number of reasons that they no longer developed on their GSOC project. Some students lost interest in the project, but still developed on other projects. Some students got jobs that didn’t deal with open source, but would do it again given the opportunity. Finally, there were some students (and mentors) that said that they didn’t like working in open source, that they were mistreated, forced or flamed out, or never felt welcome and appreciated. It is the last group that I wanted to make a difference in.

While most developers don’t experience something as terrible as the harassment that happened in the context of Gamergate or other terrible behavior documented at technical and open source conferences the last several years, it does indicate that there is a problem in our open source communities. This terrible behavior online and offline is unacceptable.  You shouldn’t be required to have a thick skin to develop open source. It should be a collaborative, not combative environment. We can’t lose valuable contributors because they felt uncomfortable or unwanted. A few mentors of large communities have had to deal with some really ugly incidents  (I’m trying to recall, but I think it was folks from Debian and Ubuntu among others) and they provided some great advice. The first was that mature communities should have some rules for behavior.  The second, and maybe more important, is that community members must point out when someone is behaving poorly. I felt that these were important point and started to consider how to make coreboot a more safe and welcoming place.

Typically, harassment, trolling, flaming, etc  is not a problem in the coreboot community.  We have a group that is generally friendly and helpful. We try to encourage good behavior and discourage bad behavior, but we could do more.  With a growing and maturing community we are going a step farther and describing what is unacceptable within our community with the coreboot Code of Conduct. It is a simple and straight forward statement about what we expect from out community members. The code of conduct is based on the Citizen Code of Conduct and similar documents in the open source community. Feel free to comment and provide feedback either publicly or privately.  Please note that this isn’t directed at anyone in particular or for a specific instance. It is part of “growing up” as an active and maturing community.