Code of conduct

Area Concerned:

The database itself.
The website, wiki, and other resources are available at https://openfoodfacts.org .
The presentations: Both the act and the resource.
The mailing lists and email communications.
The 3rd party communication tools such as Slack, Github, Trello, Twitter.

Code of Conduct

Open Food Facts is a project driven by a community of volunteers. Everyone is invited to participate, and to make sure everyone feels welcome at all times, we ask that you interact with kindness and courtesy with other members and that you follow these rules:

No discrimination

Open Food Facts is dedicated to providing a harassment-free environment for everyone regardless of age, gender, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, race, or religion.

No harassment and no threats

We will not tolerate harassment of participants in any form, or anything that threatens personal safety.

No disrespectful demands to individual contributors

All Open Food Facts participants and contributors are unpaid volunteers who dedicate time and energy to the project. Please take this into account when you request something from an individual contributor, and do accept answers like "No," "Not now," "Maybe," and/or "I don't know". Repeated and/or undue pressure to make a contributor do/answer something will be considered as harassment.

Requests that are likely to generate a significant amount of work should be sent to the administrators at contact@openfoodfacts.org and not to individual contributors.

Consequences of not respecting the code of conduct

People violating these rules may be temporary blocked or permanently banned from the project at the discretion of the administrators of the Open Food Facts Association.

In particular, bad actors who repeatedly ignore the rules and culture of the project, who are needlessly argumentative or hostile, or who are offensive, and who are unable to self-correct their behavior when asked to do so by others will be permanently banned from the project.

Reporting abuse

If you believe someone is harassing you or has otherwise violated this Code of conduct, please contact us at abuse@openfoodfacts.org to send us an abuse report. Please include as much detail as possible. It is easiest for us to address issues when we have more context.

Your report will be read, treated, and answered by Stéphane Gigandet (President of the Open Food Facts Association) and Florentin Raud (initiator of this Code of conduct).

Note: This code of conduct is inspired by the codes of conduct of other open communities like the Contributor Covenant. Feel free to reuse it or part of it.

Example rules from other coc

OSM's case:

I found 2 different code of conduct. Both have discussion surrounding them.

Github code of conduct and discussion
Wiki code of conduct and discussion

It is not enforced as far as I can tell. The closest document to a CoC I could find is well hidden as a ban policy text.

Wikipedia's case:

I found a failed attempt at doing a CoC There is also a long talk page

Fedora's case

They refer to their CoC a lot in mailing list and other online communication tool. It states to be a "guide to make it easier to be excellent to each other." It is in use, but fails to deliver a way to report breach.

PyCon's case

This CoC is aimed at a physical event, not online communication. It features both an attendee and staff procedure.

Contributor Covenant's case

This is a generic CoC that we could reuse as is. Its aim is to be a standard, the same way licenses are standards (as far as I understand the project goal)

Ada Initiative's case

They are probably one of the driver behind conferences having policies They provide ressources and arguments for a code of conduct.

Historical account of behavior on OFF

There may or may not have been behavior where a code of conduct and a way to report breach would be beneficial to resolve the issue at hand.

Since there isn't a way to report a breach of conduct, people possibly affected by a breach could have just keep it to themselves.

As far as historical bad behavior on OFF, there isn't information available.

What information

An inclusive statement
A list of what we think is not allowed
What happens when you break the code
How to report something that break the code

Where

On Github repo
On the website
On the mailing list footer (link to)

Consult the contributors

We should ask how people feel about adding a CoC. We can ask them via:

Ask our twitter followers
Ask our facebook followers
Ask as a part of a survey

A meaningful and powerful but also simple and short CoC

A draft of the CoC