GitHub’s “Contributor Covenant” Makes Waves; Curbs Online Abuse
GitHub’s “Contributor Covenant” Makes Waves; Curbs Online Abuse
Over a year ago, I wrote about GitHub’s issues with bullying and discrimination, which came to a head when a female developer quit the collaborative coding hub – a victim of gender-based harassment by white male managers and co-workers. The highly-publicized move eventually led to the resignation of GitHub’s CEO.
As a result, GitHub has made several major changes. First, they hired Nicole Sanchez as the company’s VP of Social Impact. Sanchez formalized GitHub’s organization (previously there had been no designated managers or job titles), made it easier for employee issues to be addressed, and announced that workplace diversity would be acknowledged and celebrated.
Sanchez also hired two transgender community managers: February Keeney as head of the Community and Safety team tasked with eliminating workplace harassment, and Coraline Ada Ehmke, a senior engineer and creator of the “Contributor Covenant,” a code of conduct that had been loosely adopted by several project teams.
Sanchez, Keeney, and Ehmke found, however, that their institutional changes weren’t welcome at all levels. Several groups, advocates of free speech, resisted being told that the terms of the Contributor Covenant were being applied more widely. They retaliated by using the software’s tagging feature to connect Ehmke with fake projects that had racist names, a tactic they had also used on the developer who had initially exposed the harassment in 2014.
One of the first tasks of the Community and Safety Team was to build “consent and intent” into the software. Now, you cannot tag a coder on a project without their approval. And late last year, they updated the Contributor Covenant to include guidelines for conduct that prohibited doxxing, bullying, and discrimination, as well as a wider range of moderation tools.
While there is still resistance from a few groups, Sanchez and her team have moved the company in the right direction: making the platform less prone to abuse, developing a policy that is explicit and embraces civility, diversity, and inclusion, and involving the community members in its enforcement. As she said at a recent conference, ““Diversity is coming to your party despite my bad experiences at other parties. Inclusion is being glad I came.”
