Templates and process improvements for future DjangoCon Europe Code of Conduct teams.
Phew, yesterday’s DjangoCon Europe 2024 Code of Conduct transparency report was a long time coming. Aside from us being behind schedule, it took a while to get right. I wanted to make sure to properly account for the excellent feedback we received from conference participants, and share documentation / templates for future volunteers.
Templates
After four years in a row of being on the DjangoCon Europe code of conduct team, I feel like I’ve found my limits, done most things wrong at least once, and learned a lot. I’ve also been able to build on the work of previous teams, so it felt important to leave things in a better place by sharing documentation and templates.
Here they are: Template: DjangoCon Europe 20XX CoC team (team only). There are three documents, that are normally kept private if it wasn’t for those template versions:
- One that acts as a checklist / task tracker
- One that’s how we’ve kept records of reports, decisions, and wording of different communications
- And one for transparency reports and reports to the DSF’s code of conduct team.
On most past years we also had presentations review as a separate document (a spreadsheet), though in the template versions it’s directly within the checklist / task tracker. Those working documents are never meant to be shared due to the sensitive nature of the work, hence why I think having templates will help a lot as a matter of transparency and handover.
They complement the publicly-available Code of Conduct response guide, which has been largely unchanged over the years.
Other resources
If you’re looking at those templates, you probably should also consult:
- The DjangoCon US code of conduct documentation.
- The Less obvious conference checklist’s Code of Conduct section.
- And I hear the ultimate resource if you have the chance is Code of Conduct Enforcement Training by Otter Tech.
Changes I’d like to see
There are two big ones really, where I’d like us to have done better in past years:
- More transparency. It’s hard because so much of the CoC activities are confidential. In that respect, I’ve tried hard to have transparency reports cover more than incidents yes / no, also highlighting the team’s other activities.
- More concern for participants’ privacy. In the age of the GDPR and CCPA, the legal frameworks are strong, and people are much more aware of their rights. In my experience Code of Conduct teams are very careful with the data they process, but there’s a big gap in documentation in particular.
And for that – see Compliance with privacy laws when working with conferences #41, which summarizes my research since 2023.