Fauna Community Code of Conduct & Reporter Guidelines

Intro

Fauna is dedicated to providing a positive experience for everyone, and we have published this Code of Conduct in hopes that everyone feels welcomed. If you feel that this Code of Conduct does not provide the necessary guidelines that you would need to feel welcomed, please email codeofconduct@fauna.com and we will work with you.

This Code is not exhaustive or complete. It is not a rulebook; it serves to distil our common understanding of a collaborative, shared environment and goals. If you’re unsure whether the space or the behavior is in scope for this Code of Conduct, we still encourage you to report it using our Reporter Guidelines.

Scope

The Fauna Community Code of Conduct applies to all official Fauna activities, both offline and online, including:

  • Conversations in GitHub code repositories
  • Slack communities
  • Conversations on forums.fauna.com
  • Official virtual and in-person Fauna events, such as meetups, conferences, training, and workshops

We hope all participants in the Fauna community will follow this code of conduct to ensure a safe and welcoming environment for everyone.

Community guidelines

Please adhere to the following guidelines to ensure that the Fauna community has a safe space for communication, collaboration, and contribution.

  • Be respectful. A community where people feel uncomfortable or threatened is not a productive one. Not all of us will agree all the time, but disagreement is no excuse for poor behavior and poor manners. We might all experience some frustration now and then, but we cannot allow that frustration to turn into a personal attack. We expect members of the Fauna community to be respectful when communicating with other community members, as well as with people outside the Fauna community.

  • Be patient. Unlike our Helpdesk, which is available to Team and Business tier customers, other channels such as the Community Slack, forums.fauna.com, and public GitHub repos are not officially supported channels. Fauna employees lurk in these channels and help on a best-effort basis, but we don’t guarantee engagement or provide response time SLAs. If your question or contribution does not receive an immediate response, be patient

  • Stay calm and ask questions before jumping to assumptions. It’s better to ask for clarification than to make assumptions. Remember that words and phrases can be interpreted differently depending on people’s backgrounds, and the written word is always subject to interpretation. So, give others the benefit of the doubt and try not to let emotions get out of control. Asking questions early avoids many problems later, so questions are encouraged, though they may be directed to the appropriate forum. Those who are asked should be responsive and helpful.

  • Protect your own and others’ privacy. Do not presume that anything you say or write will remain private, and behave accordingly to protect yourself and others. For attribution of specific content found on non-public channels or channels not indexed by search engines (e.g., Slack), use the Chatham House Rule as the guideline (“participants are free to use the information received, but neither the identity nor the affiliation of the speaker(s), nor that of any other participant, may be revealed”). Ask the originator of the content for permission. If you don’t receive consent in a reasonable period of time, credit the “Fauna Community.” Sharing of content from private channels is discouraged.

  • Apologize for mistakes. Should you catch yourself behaving disrespectfully, or be confronted as such, own up to your words and actions, and apologize accordingly. No one is perfect, and even well-intentioned people make mistakes. What matters is how you handle them, and avoiding repeating them in the future.

  • When in doubt, ask for help. If you experience or observe disrespectful behavior and feel in any way unable to respond or resolve it (for any reason), please follow the guidelines for emailing codeofconduct@fauna.com, and/or feel free to directly message a Fauna moderator.

Inappropriate behavior

We want all participants in the Fauna community to have the best possible experience. In order to be clear what that means, we’ve provided a list of examples of behaviors that are inappropriate for Fauna community spaces:

  • Trolling, deliberate intimidation, personal attacks or insults.
  • Public or private harassment, repetitive arguments, stalking, or following. If someone asks you to stop, then stop.
  • Publishing (or threatening to publish) others’ private or personally identifying information, such as a physical or email address, without their explicit permission (“doxing”)
  • Sexist, racist, homophobic, transphobic, ableist, or otherwise exclusionary or discriminatory language, jokes, or imagery.
  • Uninvited physical contact, sexual attention or advances of any kind.
  • Violence or threats of violence against a group or individual.
  • Other conduct which could reasonably be considered inappropriate in a professional setting.
  • Advocating for or encouraging any of the above inappropriate behaviors. If you encourage another person to violate the Code of Conduct, you may face the same consequences as if you had violated the Code of Conduct.

Participants asked to stop any inappropriate behavior are expected to comply immediately.

Activity-specific guidelines

Technical help

Our community channels (Community Slack, forums.fauna.com, and public GitHub repos) are not official paid support channels. Although some community members might work at Fauna, they are still part of an ad hoc group of people self-organizing to help each other out from timezones all over the globe.

  1. Search first. Before posting a question, please search Google, the Community Slack, forums.fauna.com, and the official Fauna documentation.
  2. Ask a good question with detailed reproduction steps. To improve your chances of getting a timely and helpful answer, follow Stack Overflow’s guidelines: How do I ask a good question? and How to create a Minimal, Reproducible Example
  3. Be patient. If your question or suggestion does not receive an immediate response, be patient and consider the norms of a volunteer-based community.
  4. Avoid direct/private messages (DMs). Ask permission before you send someone a DM. Not everyone likes them. Also, by keeping it in public, others with similar issues can see the solution you were given.
  5. Do not harass anyone for a response. As stated above, our community channels are not official support channels. One reminder ping is welcome, many reminder pings in rapid succession are not a good display of patience.
  6. Do not cross-post or spam. Similarly, cross-posting the same question in multiple threads or channels (e.g., simultaneously posting the same question to Stack Overflow, forums.fauna.com, and/or multiple Community Slack channels) is considered spamming and must be avoided.
  7. Consider upgrading your plan. If you need official support with guaranteed response times and access to an issue ticketing system, plans with extended support are available for purchase.

Security vulnerabilities, service outages, and bug reports

  • For potential security vulnerabilities, please do not post them publicly. Instead, email security@fauna.com.
  • For potential service outages, check https://status.fauna.com/ first as it is most likely a known issue already under investigation. If not, post in the Community Slack or Forums.
  • For any and all other bug reports and issues, please post on forums.fauna.com with clear, detailed reproduction steps.

Feature requests

  1. Search forums.fauna.com to see if anyone has requested it yet.

  2. If so, vote for it and optionally add a comment with details about your specific use case for the feature or improvement.

  3. If not, create a new post in the “Feature Requests” category of forums.fauna.com, and then vote for it.

  4. Feel free to solicit additional votes for the feature by sharing links to it in relevant threads in other channels.

Code contributions

  • If you want to contribute code, try starting with a GitHub Discussion or forum post to make sure that what you want to submit is a good idea and architected in a way that will be useful for others.
  • Look at existing pull requests and issues to make sure that you aren’t duplicating effort.
  • Review any existing CONTRIBUTOR.md files associated with the project.
  • If you are new to Git or GitHub, you might find these resources useful: GitHub help files, Git cheat sheets, and Git Reference documentation.

Commercial messages

  • Ask for permission before posting commercial messages, unless it is in a channel which allows commercial activity (e.g., advertising a project built on Fauna or a Fauna-related job in the forums random category or #showcase and #jobs Slack channels).
  • Use your judgment to keep commercial messages relevant to members of the Fauna community.
  • Commercial requests via direct messages (“DM”) without prior and/or obvious consent from the receiver are prohibited.

Reporter Guidelines

If you believe someone has violated the Fauna Code of Conduct, even if you have been able to resolve it peacefully but still feel that Fauna should be made aware of it, we encourage you to report it. If you are unsure whether the incident is a violation, or whether the space where it happened is covered by this Code of Conduct, we still encourage you to report it. We are fine with receiving reports where we decide to take no action for the sake of creating a safer community, and your report will be kept confidential.

Please email codeofconduct@fauna.com. This email reaches all of the Fauna Code of Conduct committee members:

  • Kelsey Bernius
  • Curtis Bray
  • Brecht DeRooms
  • Dhruv Gupta
  • Hassen Karaa
  • Jana Price
  • Bryan Reinero
  • Summer Schrader
  • Rob Sutter
  • Cory Waddingham

If you are uncomfortable with anyone from this list seeing your report, maybe because of a potential conflict of interest, please contact one or more individuals from the above list via Community Slack DM or email and be kind enough to disclose the potential conflict of interest.

Data to include in the report

If you make a report via email or phone, we hope you can provide us with some information that will help us identify the reported person. If you don’t remember all the details, we still encourage you to make a report. Please use the below template:

Incident Report template

Please complete the below to the best of your ability and submit via email to codeofconduct@fauna.com or use the Google Form.

Contact info

  • Would you prefer to remain anonymous to Fauna? If no:
    • My name:
    • My e-mail address:
    • My Slack username:
    • Would you like to receive updates about the status of the incident you are reporting?

Incident description

  • Person or persons who I feel may have violated the Code of Conduct:
  • Any other person or persons who witnessed the incident, or were otherwise affected or involved:
  • Incident date/time (if ongoing, say “ongoing” and provide date/time of most recent interaction):
  • Incident location:
  • Incident details (please include any links/attachments):
  • What actions have been taken so far to help resolve the incident?
    • No action has been taken to resolve the incident.
    • The individuals involved have tried to resolve the incident themselves.
    • Other people have stepped in to help mediate on the situation.
  • What status should we give this report?
    • This report requires immediate action.
    • This report requires action but is not time sensitive.
    • This report does not require action, but the Community Working Group should be aware of it.
    • Other (please specify)

Confidentiality

All reports will be kept confidential to the best of our ability. The Code of Conduct committee has a private Slack channel. Whenever there is a new incident report, we post a message in this Slack channel to ask who does not have a conflict of interest with the reporter or reportee. At that point, we create a new private channel to discuss the issue with only those members of the CoC committee who have confirmed no conflicts of interest.

Some incidents happen in one-on-one interactions, and even if the details are anonymized, the reported person may be able to guess who made the report. If you have concerns about retaliation or your personal safety, please note those in your report. We still encourage you to report, so that we can support you while keeping our community members safe. In some cases, we can compile several anonymized reports into a pattern of behavior, and take action on that pattern.

In some cases, we may determine that a public statement will need to be made. If that’s the case, the identities of all people impacted by the behavior and the people who reported that behavior will remain confidential, unless those individuals instruct us otherwise.

Upon request, Fauna provides transparency reports about incidents that have occurred. Anonymized information from the incident you report may be included in transparency reports.

License and attribution

The Fauna Community Code of Conduct is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License and Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 license. Language was incorporated and modified from the following Codes of Conduct by Summer Schrader (Fauna):