Code of Conduct

Why have Code of Conduct?

This Code of Conduct is designed to help all of us build a pleasant, productive, and fearless community. The purpose of the Code of Conduct is not to burden the team with a bunch of needless rules, or to give us a punishment mechanism for people "being bad," or even to correct things that have been wrong in the past. We are striving to make our community a great group of people to work with.

Overview

The Ubyssey is dedicated to providing a harassment-free learning environment and community for everyone, regardless of gender, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, religion, or anything else. We do not tolerate harassment in any form.

All communication in Ubyssey spaces, in person and online, should be appropriate for a professional audience including people of many different backgrounds. Sexual language and imagery is not appropriate in Ubyssey community spaces in any context.

While Ubyssey is a community of students, it's also a community of friends. We ask you to be aware of the fact that conversations that may be appropriate within the context of a specific friendship or relationship with another Ubyssey member may be inappropriate in the Ubyssey space or in a group conversation with Ubyssey members you don't know well.

Be kind to others. Do not insult or put down other members. Remember that harassment and sexist, racist, or exclusionary jokes are not appropriate for Ubyssey.

Ubyssey members violating these rules may be asked to leave the community at the sole discretion of the Ubyssey web developers.

Social Rules

No feigning surprise

The first rule means you shouldn't act surprised when people say they don't know something. This applies to both technical things ("What?! I can't believe you don't know what the stack is!") and non-technical things ("You don't know who RMS is?!"). Feigning surprise has absolutely no social or educational benefit: When people feign surprise, it's usually to make them feel better about themselves and others feel worse. And even when that's not the intention, it's almost always the effect. As you've probably already guessed, this rule is tightly coupled to our belief in the importance of people feeling comfortable saying "I don't know" and "I don't understand."

No well-actually's

A well-actually happens when someone says something that's almost - but not entirely - correct, and you say, "well, actually…" and then give a minor correction. This is especially annoying when the correction has no bearing on the actual conversation. This doesn't mean the Recurse Center isn't about truth-seeking or that we don't care about being precise. Almost all well-actually's in our experience are about grandstanding, not truth-seeking. (Thanks to Miguel de Icaza for originally coining the term "well-actually.")

No back-seat driving

If you overhear people working through a problem, you shouldn't intermittently lob advice across the room. This can lead to the "too many cooks" problem, but more important, it can be rude and disruptive to half-participate in a conversation. This isn't to say you shouldn't help, offer advice, or join conversations. On the contrary, we encourage all those things. Rather, it just means that when you want to help out or work with others, you should fully engage and not just butt in sporadically.

No subtle -isms

Our last social rule bans subtle racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and other kinds of bias. This one is different from the rest, because it covers a class of behaviors instead of one very specific pattern.

Subtle -isms are small things that make others feel unwelcome, things that we all sometimes do by mistake. For example, saying "It's so easy my grandmother could do it" is a subtle -ism. Like the other three social rules, this one is often accidentally broken. Like the other three, it's not a big deal to mess up – you just apologize and move on.

Thank you for helping make this a welcoming, friendly community for all.

Footnote

We borrowed parts of DigitalOcean's Engineering Code of Conduct and Recurse Center's Code of Conduct.