Note: This is a draft of a Code of Conduct meant to help a specific open source project give guidance to its commercial participants. The project is already in production use, and is successful enough that some commercial entities have become involved, offering support, hosting services, customization, etc. However, those companies need some guidelines about how to conduct themselves, in relation to the project as a whole and in relation to each other.
The first half of the draft is aimed at commercial entities. The second half of the draft contains guidelines for the open source project itself — healthy commercial participation being a two-way street.
Once the text is finalized, we plan is to post this in generic form, as a template that other projects can use, while delivering a customized version to that project.
In the meantime, comments welcome! You can simply leave regular blog comments, but we’ve also enabled the open source Hypothes.is WordPress annotation plugin to allow sidebar annotations of selected text. To use it, just mouse-select any passage of text, as though you were going to copy it to the clipboard, and then wait for the Hypothes.is annotation action buttons to pop up right under your selected text. There should be two of them: “Annotate” and “Highlight”. Choose “Annotate”, and then, at the top of the right-hand sidebar that should now open up, create a free account at Hypothes.is, or sign in if you already have an account. (We need the authentication step to help prevent spam annotations.) Once you are signed in, you can leave a sidebar comment associated with a specific passage of text — the user interface should be pretty clear from this point on. Please note that your comments will be publicly visible by default; you can also make an annnotation that’s private to yourself, but then we wouldn’t be able to see it either of course.
Continue reading “Open Source Code of Conduct for Commercial Entities (DRAFT)”