Community Affairs Incident Response Guide
VERSION v 0.1.1
Article 1. Preface
This document describes the Raku Code of Conduct enforcement procedures in general terms but is not intended to be binding or to create any rights; in all cases, ensuring that the Raku community is welcoming, inclusive, safe, and enjoyable for all (“-Ofun”) should take priority over strictly following the procedures described below.
This guide is not legal advice.
Article 2. Raku Community Affairs Team organisation
The Raku Code of Conduct is enforced by the Raku Community Affairs Team. To be able to promptly respond to Raku Code of Conduct incidents, the Raku Community Affairs Team should:
• Exchange contact information, including contact methods that allow them to be reached in more urgent situations (e.g., phone numbers).
• Ensure that each Raku Community Affairs Team member has the credentials needed to post announcements on behalf of the Raku Community Affairs Team when the group has decided on a response.
• Ensure that, to the extent possible, each Raku Community Affairs Team member can access the credentials needed to ban someone from any Raku space and/or remove media from that space (probably via a password manager or other credential-management software).
• For cases where it is not practicable for all Raku Community Affairs Team members to have the necessary credentials, the Raku Community Affairs Team should clearly document the process for banning someone/removing media (e.g., who to contact).
Article 3. Process
When the Raku Community Affairs Team receives a report of a Raku Code of Conduct violation, any members who are the subject of the report or who have an actual or apparent conflict of interest shall immediately be recused and will neither participate in further actions nor access information about the report or the Raku Community Affairs Team’s response.
Barring extraordinary circumstances, the Raku Community Affairs Team will act on all reports within 72 hours of first receiving the report. Due to the importance of promptly responding to reports, the Raku Community Affairs Team may act via either synchronous meetings or via asynchronous discussion/voting (e.g., over email). The Raku Community Affairs Team should attempt to act by consensus but, when consensus cannot be reached, it may act by simple majority vote.
To enable prompt responses, Raku Community Affairs Team members should strive to be generally responsive or to communicate that they are unavailable to respond to a particular incident and are therefore abstaining. If a Raku Community Affairs Team member does not respond to the discussion of an incident within 48 hours, they can be treated as abstaining from any vote on that incident. If a vote occurs after some discussion, Raku Community Affairs Team members may set a reasonable deadline after which non-responses will be treated as abstentions from that vote.
Article 3.1. Investigating an Incident
In some cases (especially those involving in-person conduct), the Raku Community Affairs Team may investigate the incident, such as by having one or more members speak with the reporter, the alleged violator, or others present at the incident. In other cases (especially those where a violation was recorded, such as in an IRC log or recorded conference presentation), no such investigation will be necessary.
When considering alleged violations, the Raku Community Affairs Team should bear in mind that it lacks the resources of the formal legal system and that the actions it takes inflict far less harm than those taken by the legal system. Accordingly, the Raku Community Affairs Team should not attempt to determine whether a violation has been proven beyond a reasonable doubt. Instead, it should ask what action best promotes an -Ofun community based on the facts as they appear.
Similarly, the lower severity of the remedies available to the Raku Community Affairs Team mean that alleged violators need not receive any of the procedural protections criminal defendants are entitled to, such as the right to speak in their defense. Accordingly, it is especially important that the Raku Community Affairs Team remember that determining guilt and assigning punishment are NOT within its purview; the Raku Community Affairs Team’s only job is to make decisions that will make the Raku community as -Ofun as possible.
Additionally, the Raku Community Affairs Team should remember that the violator’s intent (which may be impossible to accurately determine) is generally not relevant; instead, the Raku Community Affairs Team should focus on the impact the incident had, and the impact that other, similar events could be expected to have.
If its investigations into an incident reveal other Raku Code of Conduct violations that were not reported (e.g., an IRC argument in which multiple people engaged in personal attacks but only one was reported), the Raku Community Affairs Team should also evaluate those violations and take appropriate actions.
Article 4. Responding to an Incident
After reviewing an incident, the Raku Community Affairs Team should determine what action to take in response. When making this determination, the Raku Community Affairs Team should consult records of previous violations, both to see whether the violator has a history of poor behavior and to ensure that similar violations receive proportional responses.
Because Raku Code of Conduct violations by members of the Raku Steering Council and others in positions of trust or authority within the Raku community are especially harmful, these individuals are appropriately held to an even higher standard than other community members. The Raku Community Affairs Team should consider this higher standard when deciding what action to take when someone in that group has violated the Raku Code of Conduct.
Article 4.1. Allowed Responses
The Raku Community Affairs Team can respond to reports with any of the following actions or with any other action it deems appropriate:
• Determining that the conduct did not violate the Raku Code of Conduct or that no action is needed.
• Determining that the incident requires additional investigation.
• Speaking to the violator informally.
• Editing or redacting media (such as the video of a conference talk) that contains the violation.
• Removing media that contains the violation.
• Officially warning the violator.
• Temporarily banning the violator from one or more Raku community spaces.
• Publicly reprimanding the violator.
• Permanently banning the violator from one or more Raku community spaces.
• Recommending that the Raku Steering Council eject the violator from the Raku core team.
• Recommending that the Raku Steering Council eject the violator from the Raku core team and permanently banning them from the Raku community.
Time is sometimes of the essence when responding to a Raku Code of Conduct incident. Accordingly, without prior input from other Raku Community Affairs Team members, any member of the Raku Community Affairs Team may impose a ban of up to 48 hours and/or temporarily remove or edit media that appears to violate the Raku Code of Conduct. If a Raku Community Affairs Team member takes action in this way, the rest of the Raku Community Affairs Team should discuss the incident (including the possibility of an additional response) and participate in drafting the summary of the incident (see After Taking Action, below).
Article 4.2. Disallowed Responses
While the Raku Community Affairs Team can take appropriate actions other than those listed above, it should:
• NOT require the violator to apologize (voluntary apologies are sometimes helpful; coerced apologies never are).
• NOT ask or require the target of the violation to decide on or approve the action (this shifts blame to the target; the decision is the Raku Community Affairs Team’s responsibility).
• NOT require the violator to avoid the target (this is logistically unworkable without unfairly burdening the target’s privacy and invites future conflict).
• NOT assign someone to “chaperone” or otherwise supervise the violator (this is unfair and logistically unworkable; if the Raku Community Affairs Team is concerned enough about future violations to consider this response, it should ban the violator instead).
Article 4.3. Mediation
The Raku Community Affairs Team should not require mediation, nor should it recommend mediation as an action it takes in response to a Raku Code of Conduct violation. This is because violating the Raku Code of Conduct is an action that harms the entire Raku community; reframing the Raku Code of Conduct violation as an interpersonal conflict is inappropriate and suggests that the target of the violation is partly or equally responsible for the violation. This is incorrect: it is perfectly possible for two people to dislike each other without either violating the Raku Code of Conduct.
Article 5. Continued violation
It is equally the case that continued interpersonal conflict or animosity could lead to future Raku Code of Conduct violations and, even if it doesn’t, makes the Raku community less -Ofun. Thus, if the Raku Community Affairs Team identifies an underlying interpersonal conflict or cross-cultural misunderstanding, it can be appropriate for the Raku Community Affairs Team to offer mediation after and separate from its resolution of the violation. If the Raku Community Affairs Team offers mediation, it should state clearly that mediation is not required and is not a response that the Raku Community Affairs Team is taking based on the Raku Code of Conduct violation but rather is a service the Raku Community Affairs Team is offering to help resolve an underlying interpersonal or cross-cultural issue. Mediation should never be offered if the violation is extremely serious (e.g., harassment).
Article 6. Reports after action
In all cases, the Raku Community Affairs Team will inform the reporter how the report was resolved and may inform others who witnessed the incident. When deciding whom to inform, the Raku Community Affairs Team should keep in mind that, if a bystander is not informed that action was taken based on a Raku Code of Conduct violation, they may conclude that the Raku community permits behavior of the sort they witnessed.
Article 7. Archiving
The Raku Community Affairs Team will preserve records of the incident including, at a minimum, the initial report and a record of any action that was taken (including informal conversations with the violator). The Raku Community Affairs Team will ensure that these records are accessible to the Raku Community Affairs Team when addressing future reports but are not accessible to non-members.
Article 8. Summary
At least annually, the Raku Community Affairs Team will publish a summary of all reported incidents and any actions taken in response to those incidents; it may publish reports (either of multiple actions or a single action) more frequently based on their number or severity. Except in cases where naming the violator is essential to the action (e.g., a public reprimand), the Raku Community Affairs Team will endeavor not to name violators and will not name reporters. However, the nature of an incident may make the identity of one or both parties obvious (for example, if the incident occurred in a publicly logged IRC channel).
When summarizing an incident, the Raku Community Affairs Team should avoid going into more detail than necessary to fairly inform the community of the incident. Additionally, the Raku Community Affairs Team should recall that the identity of any party may become known even if that party isn’t named in the summary, and the Raku Community Affairs Team should be especially careful to avoid descriptions of the event that risk creating misleading impressions of the violation’s severity. If factual disputes about the incident exist, the Raku Community Affairs Team should avoid creating the impression of greater certainty about the facts than exists. If a violator cannot be identified, then the incident summary should state what action the Raku Community Affairs Team would have taken if the violator had been identified.
Example
The following incident description from the Conference in the Cloud 2020 SoC Transparency Report provides an example of the appropriate level of detail:
Slides for a talk were reported as containing inappropriate material.
The Raku Community Affairs Team reviewed the recording of the talk and agreed that this was the case.
The Raku Community Affairs Team talked with the speaker, explaining the issue and the consequences.
The speaker was given a final warning.
Article 9. Feedback and community response
Whenever the Raku Community Affairs Team publishes a summary of any incidents or otherwise communicates publicly, it shall establish an appropriate venue for discussion (e.g., a GitHub issue) and shall request that all discussion about the incidents be limited to that venue or sent directly to the Raku Community Affairs Team via email. It shall also state that discussion of the incident or debate about the appropriate response to it is off topic in all other Raku spaces and may itself be a Raku Code of Conduct violation.
The reason for this restriction is that defenses of violations can often do more to make a community non-inclusive than the initial violation itself, especially when those debates occur in spaces that are impractical for community members to avoid (such as #raku). It is essential that there be a space for the community to debate and criticize the Raku Community Affairs Team’s actions, but it’s also essential that this space be an opt-in one.
If community discussion reveals significant confusion or misunderstanding about a factual issue, the Raku Community Affairs Team may issue one follow up communication about the incident. When doing so, it should keep the following rules (from How to Respond to Code of Conduct Reports) in mind:
• Do not try to persuade people who strongly disagree with you
• Wait to see how people react to the initial announcement
• If necessary, post one follow-up to clarify any genuine misunderstandings
• Refuse to provide more details about the incident or its handling
• Refuse to engage in one-on-one arguments, online or in person
• Redirect any community-wide discussions into smaller venues
Regardless of whether the Raku Community Affairs Team issues a follow-up communication, it must not edit the original communication in any way, except that it may optionally add a single clearly labeled edit linking to the follow-up communication.
For additional guidance (including guidance on handling more severe incidents), the Raku Community Affairs Team may refer to How to Respond to Code of Conduct Reports. If doing so would be helpful, the Raku Community Affairs Team may also consult with the Community Affairs Team or Legal Committee at Yet Another Society or with other outside advisors.
Rendered from ./RakuCATGuide.rakudoc/RakuCATGuide at 09:34 UTC on 2025-09-13
Source last modified at 09:33 UTC on 2025-09-13