Transparency report for July 2024 to May 2025 – GNOME Code of Conduct Committee

GNOME’s Code of Conduct is our community’s shared standard of behavior for participants in GNOME. This is the Code of Conduct Committee’s periodic summary report of its activities from July 2024 to May 2025.

The current members of the CoC Committee are:

Anisa Kuci
Carlos Garnacho
Christopher Davis
Federico Mena Quintero
Michael Downey
Rosanna Yuen

All the members of the CoC Committee have completed Code of Conduct Incident Response training provided by Otter Tech, and are professionally trained to handle incident reports in GNOME community events.

The committee has an email address that can be used to send reports: conduct@gnome.org as well as a website for report submission: https://conduct.gnome.org/

Reports

Since July 2024, the committee has received reports on a total of 19 possible incidents. Of these, 9 incidents were determined to be actionable by the committee, and were further resolved during the reporting period.

Report about an individual in a GNOME Matrix room acting rudely toward others. A Committee representative discussed the issue with the reported individual and adjusted room permissions.
Report about an individual acting in a hostile manner toward a new GNOME contributor in a community channel. A Committee representative contacted the reported person to provide a warning and to suggest methods of friendlier engagement.
Report about a discussion on a community channel that had turned heated. After going through the referenced conversation, the Committee noted that all participants were using non-friendly language and that the turning point in the conversation was a disagreement over a moderator’s action. The committee contacted the moderator and reminded them to use kinder words in the future.
Report related to technical topics out of the scope of the CoC committee. The issue was forwarded to the Board of Directors.
Report about members’ replies in community channels; after reviewing the conversation the CoC committee decided that it was not actionable. The conversation did not violate the Code of Conduct.
Report about inappropriate and insulting comments made by a member in social moments during an offline event. The CoC Committee sent a warning to the reported person.
Report against two members making comments the reporter considered disrespectful in a community channel. After reading through the conversation, the Committee did not see any violations to the CoC. No actions were taken.
Report on someone using abrasive and aggressive language in a community channel. After reading the conversation, the Committee agrees with this assessment. As this person had previously been found to have violated the CoC, the Committee has banned the person from the channel for one month.
Report about ableist language in a GitLab merge request. The reported person was given warning not to use such language.
Report against GNOME in general without any specifics. A request for more information was sent, and after no reply after a number of months, the issue has been closed with no action.
Report against the moderating team’s efforts to keep discussions within the Code of Conduct. No action was taken.
Report about a contributor being aggressive to the reporter who is working with them, on multiple occasions. The CoC committee talked both to the reporter and the reported person, and also to other people working with them in order to solve the disagreements. The result was that the reporter had some patterns on their behavior that made it difficult to collaborate with them too. The conclusion was that all parties acknowledged their wrong behaviors and will work on improving that and be more collaborative.
Report about a disagreement with a maintainer’s decision. The report was non-actionable.
Report about a contributor who set up harassment campaigns against Foundation and non-Foundation members. This person has been suspended indefinitely from participation in GNOME.
Report about a moderator being hostile in community channels; this was not the first report we received about this member so they got banned from the channel.
Report about a blog syndicated in planet.gnome.org. The committee evaluated the blog in question and found it not to contravene the CoC, so it took no action afterwards.
Five reports, unrelated to each other, with technical support requests. These were marked as not actionable.
Report with a general comment about GNOME, marked as not actionable.
A question about where to report security issues; informed the reporter about security@gnome.org.

Changes to the CoC Committee procedures

The Foundation’s Executive Director commissioned an external review of the CoC Committee’s procedures in October of 2024. After discussion with the Foundation Board of Directors, we have made the following changes to the committee procedures:

Establish a “chain of command” for requesting tasks to be performed by sysadmins after an incident report.
Clarify the procedures for notifying affected people and teams or committees after a report.
Clarify the way notifications are made about a report’s consequences, and update the Committee’s communications infrastructure in general.
Specify how to handle reports related to Foundation staff or contractors.

The history of changes can be seen in this merge request to the repository for the Code of Conduct.

CoC Committee blog

We have a new blog at https://conduct.gnome.org/blog/, where you can read this transparency report. In the future, we hope to post materials about dealing with interpersonal conflict, non-violent communication, and other ideas to help the GNOME community.

Meetings of the CoC committee

The CoC committee has two meetings each month for general updates, and weekly ad-hoc meetings when they receive reports. There are also in-person meetings during GNOME events.

Ways to contact the CoC committee

https://conduct.gnome.org – contains the GNOME Code of Conduct and a reporting form.
conduct@gnome.org – incident reports, questions, etc.