Makerspace Code of Conduct
Introduction
Here is a link to the gitlab repo is you would like to take a look.
During my time as a director of a non-profit makerspace, I started to hear rumblings of talk and actions that don’t reflect what we stand for as an organization. There have been instances were a member has disrespected another member, talk that disrespects certain groups of people, and so on. I decided that my first major action as President was to create and add a Code of Conduct to our organizations bylaws.
Until this point, our only guideline was “Don’t be a jerk”, which works when your organization is still small and everyone knows each other intimately. However, as the organization grows, it gets to a point where you don’t know everyone as well as you did, and what constitutes being a “jerk” becomes more objective and based on the individual.
The requirements for this new Code of Conduct is as follows:
- Clear and concise guidelines on acceptable behavior of members
- Generic to not be tied to a specific makerspace, but for any shared creative workspace
- List protected classes
- Contain a section on safety
- List action items for Directors if a report is made to them
- Open source and source-controllable for an audit trail of changes
I borrowed the majority of the wording from the very well written Contributor Covenant which was originally meant for open source code projects. I modified some wording to apply to a physical creative workspace.
I also added a section on basic physical safety.
One important piece that I added to the protected classes was “skill level” and “chosen craft” which I thought was needed as I’ve heard of people disrespecting a certain way of doing things (based on experience) or craft (ex: using a cnc router vs. hand tools)
