Code of Conduct

This code of conduct outlines our expectations for Tapis users and participants, including participants on the TACC Cloud Slack channel, and describes how to report unacceptable behavior. We are committed to providing a welcoming and inspiring community for all and expect our code of conduct to be honored. Anyone who violates this code of conduct may be suspended or banned from the community.

Our open source community strives to:

Be friendly and patient: We support a community with various levels of technical and computational experience. Be friendly, patient and respectful in your communication and reporting of issues.
Be welcoming: We strive to be a community that welcomes and supports people of all backgrounds and identities. This includes, but is not limited to members of any race, ethnicity, culture, national origin, color, immigration status, social and economic class, educational level, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, age, size, family status, political belief, religion, and mental and physical ability.
Be considerate: The codebase is academic open-source software and development is done by a small but dedicated core team. Furthermore, there will be opportunities for the community to contribute code improvements. The success of the project depends on the work of others. Any decision you take will affect users and colleagues, and you should take those consequences into account when making decisions. Remember that we're a world-wide community, so you might not be communicating in someone else's primary language.
Be respectful: Not all of us will agree all the time, but disagreement is no excuse for poor behavior and poor manners. We all experience some frustration now and then, but we cannot allow that frustration to turn into a personal attack. It’s important to remember that a community where people feel uncomfortable or threatened is not a productive one. Please remember, when communicating via slack or other mediums, there is an actual person on the other end learning from you and helping resolve issues. We are a world-wide community, so you might not be communicating in someone else's primary language.
Be careful in the words that we choose: We are a community of professionals, and we conduct ourselves professionally. Be kind to others. Do not insult or put down other participants. Harassment and other exclusionary behavior are not acceptable. This includes, but is not limited to: Violent threats or language directed against another person, Discriminatory jokes and language, Posting sexually explicit or violent material, Posting (or threatening to post) other people’s personally identifying information (“doxing”), Personal insults, especially those using racist or sexist terms, Unwelcome sexual attention, Advocating for, or encouraging, any of the above behavior, Repeated harassment of others. In general, if someone asks you to stop, then stop.
Try to understand why we disagree: Disagreements, both social and technical, happen all the time. It is important that we resolve disagreements and differing views constructively. Remember that we’re different. Diversity contributes to the strength of our community, which is composed of people from a wide range of backgrounds. Different people have different perspectives on issues. Being unable to understand why someone holds a viewpoint doesn’t mean that they’re wrong. Don’t forget that it is human to err and blaming each other doesn’t get us anywhere. Instead, focus on helping to resolve issues and learning from mistakes.

A few suggestions when dealing with conflict:

Assume best intentions
Listen to understand, not respond
Let the other person finish
Try to communicate about the problem and not the people
Context is difficult when communicating in email/slack. Be mindful of your words. How would you react if you were the receiver of this message?
Listen harder if you disagree
Pause and clarify - test assumptions and repeat your understanding of what the other person said before disagreeing. Stop and think before you hit send on your email/slack message and to ensure your intentions are clear.
Share all relevant information and agree on the important details

Diversity Statement

We encourage everyone to participate and are committed to building a community for all. Although we will fail at times, we seek to treat everyone as fairly and equally as possible. Whenever a participant has made a mistake, we expect them to take responsibility for it. If someone has been harmed or offended, it is our responsibility to listen carefully and respectfully, and do our best to right the wrong.

Although this list cannot be exhaustive, we explicitly honor diversity in age, gender, gender identity or expression, culture, ethnicity, language, national origin, political beliefs, profession, race, religion, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, and degree of experience. We will not tolerate discrimination based on any of the protected characteristics above, including participants with disabilities.

Enforcement Procedures

A majority of our communication occurs on the Tapis/TACC Cloud slack, tickets, and GitHub issues. Our goal is to maintain a safe and helpful community on slack to make your experience using TACC Cloud services as beneficial as possible. These enforcement procedures apply to unacceptable behavior occurring in all community venues, including behavior outside the scope of the community – online or in person – as well as all one-on-one communication where the behavior has the potential to adversely affect the safety and well-being of the community. Understand that speech and actions have consequences, and unacceptable behavior will not be tolerated.

Anyone requested to stop unacceptable behavior is expected to comply immediately.
Tapis project staff (or their designee) or security/local police may take action deemed necessary and appropriate, including immediate removal from the slack channel event, conference, workshop, field project, facility without warning or refund.
Tapis staff reserves the right to prohibit attendance at a future event, conference, workshop or field project.
All users, participants, and staff are governed by their organization's code of conduct or sexual harassment policies. Notification of an infraction to a Home Institution. In cases where there has been a potentially serious policy or code of conduct violation TACC will notify the offender’s home institution.

Reporting Issues

If you experience or witness unacceptable behavior, or have any other concerns, please report it to ombudsman@tacc.utexas.edu and all reports will be handled with discretion. If something makes you feel concerned, or worried - even if you’re not sure it’s a violation, it’s better to reach out and let us know. In your report please include:

Your contact information.
Names (real, nicknames, or pseudonyms) of any individuals involved. If there are additional witnesses, please include them as well. Your account of what occurred, and if you believe the incident is ongoing. If there is a publicly available record (e.g. a mailing list archive or a public IRC logger), please include a link.
Any additional information that may be helpful.

If you file a report, a project representative will contact you personally, review the incident, follow up with any additional questions, and decide as to how to respond. If the person who is harassing you is part of the response team, they will recuse themselves from handling your incident. If the complaint originates from a member of the response team, it will be handled by a different member of the response team. We will respect confidentiality requests for the purpose of protecting victims of abuse.

Attribution & Acknowledgements

This code of conduct is based on the Open Code of Conduct from the Galaxy Project, Python Foundation, Slack, Django Project and TODO Group.

Update Logs

January 2020: Initial Release of Code of Conduct