Introducing GitHub Community Guidelines

Building software should be safe for everyone. The GitHub community is made up of millions of developers around the world, ranging from the new developer who created their first “Hello World” project to the most well-known software developers in the world. We want the GitHub community to be a welcoming environment where people feel empowered to share their opinion and aren’t silenced by fear or shouted down.

Beginning today, we will be accepting feedback on proposed GitHub Community Guidelines. By outlining what we expect to see within our community, we hope to help you understand how best to collaborate on GitHub and what type of actions or content may violate our Terms of Service. The policy consists of four parts:

1. Best practices for building a strong community – people are encouraged to be welcoming, assume no malice, stay on topic, and use clear and concise language at all times.
2. What to do if something offends you – project maintainers are encouraged to communicate expectations and to moderate comments within their community — including locking conversations or blocking users when necessary.
3. What behavior is not allowed on GitHub – the community will not tolerate threats of violence, hate speech, bullying, harassment, impersonation, invasions of privacy, sexually explicit content, or active malware.
4. What happens if someone breaks the rules – GitHub may block or remove content and may terminate or suspend accounts that violate these rules.

As always, we will continue to investigate any abuse reports and may moderate public content on our site that we determine to be in violation of our Terms of Service. To be clear, GitHub does not actively seek out content to moderate. Instead, we rely on community members like you to communicate expectations, moderate projects, and report abusive behavior or content.

Additionally, we are releasing the guidelines under the Creative Commons Zero License in hopes of encouraging other platforms to establish similar norms to govern their respective communities.

These guidelines are first and foremost community guidelines and we’d like to hear your thoughts on them before they’re finalized. Please get in touch with us with any feedback or questions prior to November 20th, 2016. Together, we can make the open source community a healthy, inclusive place we can all be proud of.

Written by

Brian Levine

@balevine