Recruiting Task Force Members for Incidents Outside the mandate of The Carpentries Code of Conduct Committee

With a growing community and an increasing number of Carpentries spaces (online and in-person), The Carpentries is encountering circumstances where we feel we should respond to cases of inappropriate conduct that happen outside of our formal guidelines and processes. Our Code of Conduct (CoC) and Code of Conduct committee are now quite mature with a fairly tightly defined scope. There is less clarity around incidents outside the Code of Conduct committee’s current mandate, including incidents that may have occurred outside of Carpentries spaces, incidents that happen within Carpentries spaces that are not reported, or where people would like to share information or get feedback, rather than formally report an incident. These incidents may impact the ability of members to feel safe working in our community. We want to respond to these events in a timely manner and in a consistent way that balances transparency, confidentiality and legal considerations.

To address this concern, the Executive Council is convening a Task Force to provide recommendations for responding to incidents outside the mandate of the Code of Conduct committee.

Task Force Objectives

This task force will produce a report that the Executive Council can use to plan and execute an implementation strategy, including the following deliverables:

• Recommendations that can be used to develop support structures and/or draft guidelines for incidents that happen outside the mandate of The Carpentries Code of Conduct committee.
• A public report of task force discussions and recommendations to be shared with The Carpentries community.

We will regularly and consistently update the public GitHub project on the status of this work.

Getting Involved

To accomplish the objectives of this task force we need:

• 2-3 Members to sit on or be interviewed by the task force. Task force participants should have any combination of the following experience and expertise:
  • Having worked on other Code of Conduct committees
  • Legal expertise
  • Expertise in cross-cultural communication
  • Experience writing policy
  • Conflict resolution experience
  • Having served on a task force
  • Geographic and language diversity
• Anonymous feedback from community members regarding potential incidents.

If you are interested in serving on this task force (timeframe: 1 August through 20 September), or being interviewed or involved in another way, please complete the application form.