rOpenSci Code of Conduct Committee Templates

At rOpenSci, our Code of Conduct (CoC) committee works to support a healthy, welcoming, and inclusive community. A big part of this work is making sure that the processes we follow are transparent, consistent, and fair. Over the years, we’ve developed a set of templates that guide us through different stages of incident response and reporting.

We believe these templates may be useful for other communities and projects in open science that are establishing or refining their own CoC processes. Today, we are sharing them with you.

🔗 Why templates?

Handling Code of Conduct issues can be emotionally demanding and logistically complex. Templates help us by:

• Providing structure: ensuring we don’t miss important steps.
• Improving consistency: so similar situations are handled in similar ways.
• Supporting transparency: both internally and externally, we can clearly show how decisions are made.
• Reducing stress: in sensitive moments, having a clear guide helps committee members focus on people, not paperwork.
• Easing onboarding and documenting processes: new committee members can quickly get up to speed, and we maintain a written record of how we handle different situations.

🔗 The templates

Our templates cover both internal workflows (helping the committee document and process incidents) and community-facing communication (keeping our community informed in a consistent way). Together, they give us a clear structure and schedule for everything from receiving a report to sharing aggregated updates. Here’s an overview of the templates we rely on at rOpenSci:

• CoC update report: a framework for annual updates to the community about the committee’s activities.

• CoC transparency report: a public-facing report that shares in a yearly aggregate way the types of incidents handled and outcomes, while protecting privacy.

• Internal incident summary: a confidential document for committee use, summarizing the key facts and steps taken in a specific incident.

• Internal handling incident report: introduced in an earlier blog post, this guides us through the process of responding to a report from start to finish.

• CoC reporting form: the form community members use to submit a report.

• Incident report email acknowledgement: a standard response we send to confirm receipt of a report, so reporters know their concern has been heard and is being handled.

🔗 How you can use them

We know every community has different values, resources, and contexts, so consider these templates a toolbox rather than a one-size-fits-all solution. You might use them as-is, or treat them as a starting point to design your own processes.

You can access all the templates together in the GitHub repository with community management tools. You can fork them, adapt them, and make them work for your own community context. We’d love to hear how you adapt or improve them for your own communities.

🔗 Acknowledgements

We want to thank all past and present members of the rOpenSci Code of Conduct Committee. Their work has made it possible for us to share these templates openly today.