Almost every open source project has a Code of Conduct, and most of us hope it’s doing more work than it actually is. In this follow-up to “Building a No-Drama Community” (SFSCON 2024), we’ll look at what tends to happen after a project adopts a CoC, why the document on its own can only carry so much weight, and how the goodwill a project has spent years building can be worn down surprisingly quickly when someone learns to work the process from the outside.
Drawing on five years of running the AlmaLinux OS Foundation and two decades in open source communities, this talk walks through some of the common ways CoCs fall short in practice (adopted without a clear enforcement path, leaned on as legal cover, or used against the very people they were meant to protect), the patterns bad actors tend to rely on, and the structural foundation that makes a CoC meaningful: distributed authority, documented process, transparent decisions, and the organizational will to actually follow through.
Aimed at community leaders, project maintainers, and foundation directors who have a Code of Conduct in place and are quietly wondering whether it’s doing enough. Practical, honest, and grounded in what has worked and what hasn’t.
