Be decent to people. Argue about the work, not about the person doing it.
This project is maintained in public by a small team, and most of what happens in it is review — someone reading someone else's work and saying what is wrong with it. That is the interaction most likely to go badly, so it is the one worth being explicit about:
- Critique the change, not the author. "This drops the site scope" is review. "You clearly did not read the code" is not, and it makes the first sentence harder to hear.
- Assume the other person had a reason. Ask what it was before explaining why it is wrong. It is frequently a reason.
- Take no for an answer. A change can be well made and still not belong in this repository. That decision is the maintainers', it will come with a reason, and re-opening the argument in three places is not an appeal.
- Nobody owes you a review on your schedule. This is not a support contract. A ping after a week is fine; a ping a day is not.
Unacceptable, and acted on rather than debated: harassment, personal or demographic insults, sexual attention or imagery, publishing anybody's private information, and sustained disruption of a discussion. Politics, nationality, religion and identity are off-topic in this repository — not because they do not matter, but because they are not what anyone came here to resolve.
Issues, pull requests, discussions, commit messages, and anywhere someone is representing this project.
Email hey@getopen.so. Reports are read by the maintainers and kept confidential; we will not act on one without talking to you first, unless somebody is in danger.
There is no committee and no appeals process, because there are two of us and inventing one would be theatre. What there is: we will tell you what we decided and why. Consequences run from "please stop" through an edit or a lock, to a block from the organization.
If your report is about a maintainer, say so and send it anyway — one of us is not the other.
The Covenant is the default and is a perfectly good document. It is also long enough that nobody reads it, which makes it furniture rather than a rule. This says the same things in the words we would use if we had to enforce them.