This is a guide for the organizers and volunteers of DjangoCon Europe on handling Code of Conduct (CoC) reports. This guide mainly aims at conference staff to help us deal with incidents professionally and reduce the risk of mistakes. This is especially important because conferences are stressful and involve significant time pressure. However, it's always possible that particular circumstances require a deviation from this guide.
Some parts of this guide discuss very severe incidents, like ongoing violence. These events are not expected at DjangoCon, but we want to be as prepared as reasonably possible for anything from the most common minor incidents to the most severe cases.
DjangoCon Europe has a dedicated Code of Conduct Active Response Ensurers (CARE) team, which will generally handle any reports. However, other organizers and volunteers are sometimes the first point of contact or may observe incidents themselves.
In general, as a conference representative, you should be aware that other participants will look to you for appropriate behaviour within the Code of Conduct.
When you are an organizer or volunteer not on the CARE team, the general guidelines for observing an incident or receiving a report are:
When speaking to a reporter, be cautious in your wording. Try to be understanding and compassionate, and make them feel heard and taken seriously. However, do not make commitments about whether the conference will see this as a violation or what action will be taken.
In urgent cases, where it is impossible to contact a CARE team member, and you think immediate action is essential, you may intervene unilaterally. For example, you may consider this:
Even in these cases, you can consult with another organizer or volunteer if you see one nearby.
The Code of Conduct Active Response Ensurers (CARE) handle reports until their completion. Their task is to ensure that all reports are handled timely and professionally. Our CARE team is still in the making—volunteers are welcome.
Participants look towards the CARE team for appropriate behavior, even more than other staff, making it essential for their behavior to remain within the Code of Conduct. Violations by CARE team members can severely erode trust in the Code of Conduct process.
CARE team members almost never act independently, including tasks like replying to Code of Conduct-related emails. If it’s not possible to meet with the entire team in time, at least one other team member should be consulted.
Reports are typically received by e-mail, in Slack, or from another staff member. If the report was received from someone else, it may be best to meet with the original reporter first, depending on how complete the information is. The info the CARE team aims to collect is listed in the Code of Conduct reporting guide, but sometimes, not all information is available.
When receiving a report, the CARE team acknowledges receipt as soon as possible and aims to be understanding and compassionate. However, there should be no commitment to whether this is a violation or to which action will be taken.
The CARE team generally works, decides, and communicates as a team. If the report indicates that immediate action is required and other CARE team members are unavailable, any CARE team member may take the appropriate action. The same guidelines for unilateral action apply to other staff members as listed above. If possible, it’s still preferred to take action after a brief discussion with at least one other CARE team member or even any other organizer rather than acting entirely unilaterally. Formal processes and guidelines must never get in the way of preventing threats to anyone’s safety.
Based on the report and any other available information, the CARE team will meet to determine, to the best of their ability:
A written record of each incident and its review will be kept. Although that sometimes seems superfluous at the time, hectic environments like conferences can make it easy to forget or confuse details later.
As a result of the meeting, the CARE team may conclude a resolution or conclude that additional information should be obtained. This additional information will be collected as soon as possible in the latter case. Two people from the CARE team should generally do any conversations as part of this.
Team members should declare any conflicts of interest as soon as reasonable, but at the latest at the report review meeting. This can mean being friends with one of the involved parties or anything else that may make it harder to remain neutral.
A conflict of interest does not inherently mean the team member can no longer participate in the process, as that would make it very hard for the team to act on reports involving well-known people in the community. However, if a report concerns someone a team member is close to, they probably should not participate in the process. The team will decide where to draw this line in individual cases. Where possible, any conversations with offenders should not be done by their friends, as it can be very unpleasant for everyone involved.
The most common resolutions the CARE team can decide on are:
Resolutions are not restricted to these options. Two people from the CARE team have conversations with bad actors, and notes from these conversations are added to the incident record.
When deciding on a resolution, our primary goal is to address the report in an appropriate way while also looking to prevent or reduce the risk of continuing harm in the future. For example, we may try to distinguish whether a violation occurred intentionally or not, especially in cases that are not too severe, like inappropriate jokes. We'll probably choose more robust measures in intentional cases or severe behavior. The CARE team can also use behavior on social media, the conference Slack, or personal interactions to further build a picture of the person(s) involved.
After the resolution is complete, the reporter should be informed of the CARE team's action and the reasoning behind it.
As a general rule, conference staff should not make any public statements about the behavior of individual people during or after the conference. An exception to this is situations that happened in a reasonably public context because attendees may otherwise think no action was taken, eroding trust in the Code of Conduct process. The CARE team will decide together whether to make a public statement and, if so, in how much detail. This should not be decided unilaterally.
After each conference, the CARE team will publish a Code of Conduct transparency report with anonymized information about any violations that might have occurred.
Any public statements should be handled with care not to divulge personally identifying information about anyone affected. They should serve as a means to ensure that attendees will be comfortable reporting harassment and that our community will be held accountable for supporting and encouraging safe spaces.
