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Governance

Code of conduct

Community standards and enforcement.

Koda's community standards are plain, enforced consistently, and non-negotiable. The canonical document is CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md in the repository — this page summarises it and explains how it's upheld.

Principles

Three expectations apply to every interaction: issues, pull requests, discussions, code review, and any synchronous channel the project uses.

  • Be respectful. Disagreement is welcome; personal attacks, insults, and hostility are not. Critique ideas, not people.
  • Be inclusive. Koda is an international, multilingual project. Assume good faith, avoid region-specific idioms when they add nothing, and default to English in public spaces so everyone can follow along.
  • Be constructive. If you see a problem, say what would improve it. If something works well, name it. Reviews that only point out flaws leave the contributor with no direction.

What's not OK

  • Harassment in any form — sexual, racist, ableist, or otherwise targeting a person's identity or circumstances.
  • Personal attacks, sustained disruption, or bad-faith argument.
  • Sharing others' private information without explicit consent.
  • Posting content in public project spaces that would be unwelcome at a professional conference: explicit imagery, deliberately provocative language, off-topic political campaigning.

Reporting

If you see or experience behaviour that conflicts with the code, report it. The escalation path, in order:

  1. If you're comfortable doing so, raise it directly with the person involved — privately, specifically, and with the assumption they'll act on it.
  2. Otherwise, contact the maintainers via the email address listed in CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md. Reports are read by a small group, kept confidential, and acknowledged within a few working days.
  3. For security-adjacent concerns (doxxing, ongoing harassment, coordinated brigading), follow the security disclosure path in SECURITY.md — it reaches the same responders faster.
Confidentiality
Reporters' identities are not shared with the subject of a report without the reporter's explicit consent. Investigations may require disclosing facts of an incident while keeping reporter identity protected.

Enforcement

Maintainers respond with proportional consequences. The response considers severity, frequency, impact, and the responder's prior engagement with the project.

  • Private correction. A direct message explaining what was wrong and what the expectation is going forward. The default response for a first, minor incident.
  • Public warning. A visible note in the thread or discussion when the behaviour was public and the correction needs to be as well. Used to close a disruptive thread cleanly.
  • Temporary ban. Restriction from specific spaces (issues, PRs, discussions) for a set period. Used for repeated or clearly unacceptable behaviour.
  • Permanent ban. For severe cases or patterns of repeated harm. Ending this way is rare; it's what's left when the lesser steps have failed or the conduct is too serious to handle otherwise.

Attribution

The code of conduct is adapted from the Contributor Covenant. Details and the full text live in CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md. When in doubt, the repository document is authoritative over this summary.

Next steps