Code of Conduct

The organizers of R Project Sprint 2023 are dedicated to providing a harassment-free conference experience for everyone regardless of age, gender, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, race, or religion (or lack thereof).

All participants at R Project Sprint 2023 are required to agree to the following code of conduct.

The code of conduct applies to all sprint activities including
social events. It extends to event-specific exchanges on social media, for instance posts tagged with the identifier of the sprint (#RSprint2023) and replies to such posts.

Organizers will enforce this code throughout and expect cooperation in ensuring a safe environment for all.

Expected Behaviour

All conference participants agree to:

  • Be considerate in language and actions, and respect the boundaries of fellow participants.
  • Refrain from demeaning, discriminatory, or harassing behaviour and language. Please refer to Unacceptable Behaviour for more details.
  • Alert a member of the organizing team if you notice someone in distress, or observe violations of this code of conduct, even if they seem inconsequential. Please refer to the section titled What To Do If You Witness or Are Subject To Unacceptable Behaviour for more details.

Unacceptable Behaviour

Behaviour that is unacceptable includes, but is not limited to:

  • Stalking
  • Deliberate intimidation
  • Unwanted photography or recording
  • Sustained or willful disruption of talks or other events
  • Use of sexual or discriminatory imagery, comments, or jokes
  • Offensive comments related to age, gender, sexual orientation, disability, race or religion
  • Inappropriate physical contact, which can include grabbing, or massaging or hugging without consent.
  • Unwelcome sexual attention, which can include inappropriate questions of a sexual nature, asking for sexual favours or repeatedly asking for dates or contact information.

If you are asked to stop harassing behaviour you should stop immediately, even if your behaviour was meant to be friendly or a joke, it was clearly not taken that way and for the comfort of all conference attendees you should stop.

Attendees who behave in a manner deemed inappropriate are subject to actions listed under Procedure for Code of Conduct Violations.

Additional Requirements for Sprint Material

Presentation slides and documents created for, or during, the sprint should not contain offensive or sexualised material.

Procedure for Code of Conduct Violations

The organizing team reserves the right to determine the appropriate response for all code of conduct violations. Potential responses include:

  • a formal warning to stop harassing behaviour
  • cancellation or early termination of presentations or other contributions to the programme
  • expulsion from the sprint
  • removal/rejection of sprint contributions
  • removal of sponsorship acknowledgement, without return of sponsorship contribution

What To Do If You Witness or Are Subject To Unacceptable Behaviour

Alert the organizing team if you notice someone in distress, or observe violations of this code of conduct, even if they seem inconsequential.

Reports should be addressed to r-project-sprint@livewarwickac.onmicrosoft.com. If the report concerns someone on the local organizing team, please contact other members of the team directly. If you still have concerns about a conflict of interest, you are welcome to contact the University of Warwick Report + Support service.

We will take all reports by R Project Sprint 2023 participants seriously. This includes incidents outside our spaces and at any point in time. The organizing team reserve the right to exclude people from the sprint based on their past behaviour, including behaviour outside R Project Sprint 2023 spaces and behaviour towards people who are not part of the sprint.

We will respect confidentiality requests for the purpose of protecting targets of harassing behaviour. We will not name victims without their affirmative consent. Correspondence is handled confidentially and deleted after the case is resolved. All data is stored securely, access will be limited to the members of the organizing team who receive the report.

The organizing team will also provide support to victims, which may include:

  • providing an escort,

  • contacting the on-campus Community Safety Team or off campus Emergency Services,

or otherwise assisting those experiencing harassment to ensure that they feel safe for the duration of the conference. Assistance will only be provided with affirmative consent of the victim.

Acknowledgements

Parts of the above text are licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. Credit to SRCCON. This code of conduct was based on that developed for useR! 2018 which was a revision of the code of conduct used at previous useR!s and also drew from rOpenSci’s code of conduct.