How To Implement a Code of Conduct in 4 Simple Steps
DEVELOPERS
7digital loves to host fun and informative events for developers and devops with our “Devs in the ‘Ditch” and “DevOps in the ‘Ditch” series. Our community is ever-expanding and we pride ourselves on keeping an all inclusive and welcoming atmosphere in our space.
Since our lovely event space (aka our ‘canteen’) emits such an air of sophistication and openness, we assume most attendees know how to behave appropriately at our events. However, we also felt it was important to let everyone know what good behaviour and openness means to us. So, with open arms and an open mind, we wrote a simple code of conduct for those attending our events.
We are doing this as a pro-active measure and to ensure our excellent track record of attendee safety and wellbeing is maintained.
We also hope to inspire others with this method and encourage everyone who runs events to consider a code of conduct that works for them. It is a small but very meaningful step that you can take that will help in making our industry a better place for everyone. With that in mind, we have written a little ‘how to’ guide.
1. Create the Code of Conduct itself.
We used an open source zero licence Code of Conduct, which can be found here:
http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Community_anti-harassment/Policy
As it is zero licence, you can adapt it to your events needs but it is a very comprehensive and explicit basis. We doubt you will need to change much.
2. Run it past HR
Once we had modified our code of conduct to suit our needs, we then passed it to HR for a quick look. After all, they are probably the most experienced in this type of thing and may provide additional support or some feedback for you.
3. Decide on a contact team
Once we got the green light from HR and had made a few changes at their request, we created a dedicated email for reporting incidents. We made sure there were multiple people who could access this email, but not the whole company. We included the event organiser and HR.
This is the most crucial step in the process – if you do not have a dedicated point of contact for reporting breaches, you can never enforce it.
4. Make sure it is available and attendees are aware of it
Finally we added links to our code of conduct to our meetup pages and made sure that all confirmation emails from meetup regarding our events feature a link to our code of conduct page. We also made sure event organisers understood everything laid out in the document and were supportive of it.
All those who sign up to attend will see a simple short version of this and agree to comply to our standards. In the case that there is any unsavoury behaviour, we have a long version, which gives us more explicit guidance in defining if this behaviour was or wasn’t acceptable.
As you can see – it was surprisingly simpler than we thought to create a code of conduct – we hope many others follow suit.