Community strategy and organizing#
This is a guide to help communities that we serve think about ways that they can improve the dynamics and strucure of their communities. It is not comprehensive, and instead points to resources from experts on community design, as well as examples for inspiration.
Other experts in community organizing#
There are several organizations and communities that focus their expertise and interests on building healthy, open communities. Many of them are open communities and welcome participation from others. Below are a few that 2i2c has interacted with in the past (in alphabetical order).
Codes of Conduct#
Communities may wish to develop a code of conduct to define the expectations and guidelines for how others can behave within a community. This is an important and complex part of building healthy community culture.
A Code of Conduct should not be adopted lightly, as it will define the cultural norms and policies that guide the behavior of your community. Make sure that you adopt a CoC that works for your community and its values.
Below are several pointers to help you get started.
Think about enforcement
Make sure that you commit to enforcing your Code of Conduct and providing support and training for the people tasked with doing so. See this blog post and this blog post for two examples of what happens when an enforcement policy is not carried out properly. Many of the resources below have excellent suggestions for how to set up a system for enforcement.
Example CoCs#
CSCCE Contributing Guidelines: https://www.cscce.org/cscce-community-participation-guidelines/ / blog post about the release of these guidelines (community strategy and design group)
The Turing Way Code of Conduct: https://the-turing-way.netlify.app/community-handbook/coc.html (distributed community)
The 2i2c Code of Conduct: https://team-compass.2i2c.org/en/latest/code-of-conduct/index.html (cloud services / infrastructure)
The Recurse Center Code of Conduct: https://www.recurse.com/code-of-conduct (technology and software organization)
The INCF community participation guidelines: https://www.incf.org/community-guidelines (research community)
Guides and Templates for CoCs#
An OpenLifeScience presentation about the importance of Contributing Guidelines and CoCs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0A2TaLyhlY&t=2453s
The Project Include guide to CoCs: https://projectinclude.org/writing_cocs - a high-level guide for many factors to take into consideration.
The Frameshift Consulting CoC Response guide: https://files.frameshiftconsulting.com/books/cocguide.pdf - a detailed and comprehensive guide around responding to CoC reports. Also covers many aspects of CoC committee composition, reporting, etc.
The Contributor Covenant: https://www.contributor-covenant.org/ - this a “minimal viable product” CoC that is meant to bootstrap communities that want to organize more. It doesn’t cover many things but is a reasonable first step.