Online communities include people from many different backgrounds. The Go contributors are committed to providing a friendly, safe and welcoming environment for all, regardless of age, disability, gender, nationality, race, religion, sexuality, or similar personal characteristic.
The first goal of the Code of Conduct is to specify a baseline standard of behavior so that people with different social values and communication styles can talk about Go effectively, productively, and respectfully.
The second goal is to provide a mechanism for resolving conflicts in the community when they arise.
The third goal of the Code of Conduct is to make our community welcoming to people from different backgrounds. Diversity is critical to the project; for Go to be successful, it needs contributors and users from all backgrounds. (See Go, Open Source, Community.)
With that said, a healthy community must allow for disagreement and debate. The Code of Conduct is not a mechanism for people to silence others with whom they disagree.
If you participate in or contribute to the Go ecosystem in any way, you are encouraged to follow the Code of Conduct while doing so.
Explicit enforcement of the Code of Conduct applies to the official forums operated by the Go project (“Go spaces”):
Other Go groups (such as conferences, meetups, and other unofficial forums) are encouraged to adopt this Code of Conduct. Those groups must provide their own moderators and/or working group (see below).
These are the values to which people in the Go community (“Gophers”) should aspire.
People are complicated. You should expect to be misunderstood and to misunderstand others; when this inevitably occurs, resist the urge to be defensive or assign blame. Try not to take offense where no offense was intended. Give people the benefit of the doubt. Even if the intent was to provoke, do not rise to it. It is the responsibility of all parties to de-escalate conflict when it arises.
These actions are explicitly forbidden in Go spaces:
The Go spaces are not free speech venues; they are for discussion about Go. These spaces have moderators. The goal of the moderators is to facilitate civil discussion about Go.
When using the official Go spaces you should act in the spirit of the “Gopher values”. If you conduct yourself in a way that is explicitly forbidden by the CoC, you will be warned and asked to stop. If you do not stop, you will be removed from our community spaces temporarily. Repeated, wilful breaches of the CoC will result in a permanent ban.
Moderators are held to a higher standard than other community members. If a moderator creates an inappropriate situation, they should expect less leeway than others, and should expect to be removed from their position if they cannot adhere to the CoC.
Complaints about moderator actions must be handled using the reporting process below.
The Code of Conduct Working Group is a group of people that represent the Go community. They are responsible for handling conduct-related issues. Their purpose is to de-escalate conflicts and try to resolve issues to the satisfaction of all parties. They are:
If you encounter a conduct-related issue, you should report it to the Working Group using the process described below. Do not post about the issue publicly or try to rally sentiment against a particular individual or group.
Note that the goal of the Code of Conduct and the Working Group is to resolve conflicts in the most harmonious way possible. We hope that in most cases issues may be resolved through polite discussion and mutual agreement. Bannings and other forceful measures are to be employed only as a last resort.
Changes to the Code of Conduct (including to the members of the Working Group) should be proposed using the change proposal process.
Parts of this document were derived from the Code of Conduct documents of the Django, FreeBSD, and Rust projects.