Preamble
The Haskell Foundation has adopted these guidelines for respectful communication.
We do not seek to impose these guidelines on members of the Haskell community generally. Rather it is a signal that we seek high standards of discourse in the Haskell community, and are willing to publicly hold ourselves to that standard, in the hope that others may voluntarily follow suit.
Motivation
We are motivated to adopt a set of guidelines for respectful communication for several reasons
- Diversity and inclusion. We recognize that the Haskell community, echoing the technology industry more generally, skews white and male. We see it as our duty and honour to spread the joy of Haskell widely and to broaden the patterns of participation, in the hopes that, one day, we will no longer be askew.
- Making an explicit commitment will encourage us to review our messages to see if they meet the goals set out here, and will give others some specifics to point to if we fail.
Guidelines For Respectful Communication
As members of the Haskell Foundation, we commit ourselves to a high standard of public behaviour. We have one over-arching rule:
We strive to treat every person with respect.
Specifically, we aspire to these behaviours:
- We welcome into the Haskell community people of all backgrounds, identities, and beliefs, provided only that they in turn behave in the respectful way articulated in these guidelines.
- We treat everyone with courtesy, aware that their diverse backgrounds, experiences, goals, and perspectives may be very different to ours.
- In our communication, we consistently honour and affirm the passion, professional expertise, and good intentions of others. When we doubt these qualities in someone else, we prefer to deal with those matters discreetly, instead of making public accusations.
- We strive to be scrupulously polite at all times. There should be no rudeness, name-calling, or harassment in our communication.
- We avoid forms of expression and other behaviours that attack, humiliate, demean, or marginalise - even where we disagree with that person.
- Disagreement itself is fine: we are enriched by robust technical debate. But we seek to make the tone of that debate to be a conversation among people who respect, or even admire, each other.
- Where we disagree, we try to be curious about the perspective, goals, motivation, and priorities of the other person.
We seek to apply these standards in all our public interactions in the Haskell sphere, including email, social media, discussion forums, and so on.
All these guidelines apply to our behaviour; that is, what we do. They specifically do not, and should not, seek to constrain anyone's beliefs; that is, what they think.
If one of us fails to meet these standards, the ideal course of action is to write to that person privately, gently drawing attention to their lapse. If you're not comfortable with that, please contact the chair of the Foundation, or (if the chair is the problem) the vice-chair or co-chair.
Our response should usually be to apologise and stop doing what it was that you are unhappy about. Even if we feel we have been misinterpreted or unfairly accused, the chances are good there was something we could have communicated better, and an apology is far more likely to bring healing than is a counter-accusation.
Acknowledgements
We'd like to thank the communities and projects that established code of conducts and diversity statements as our inspiration, including these:
