These guidelines aim to be an aspirational ideal for how we should behave when interacting in the SilverStripe developer community and to aid in building great open source software.
* Be respectful and honour diversity in our community. Sexist, racist, and other exclusionary jokes can offend those around you and are not appropriate.
* Keep your actions lawful, non-discriminatory, and unthreatening towards others.
## Respect the reader’s time.
* Be concise and read over things before you post.
* Mind your words; you write a single time but what you write will be read by many. Being abusive, mean spirited and swearing at others do nothing to help get your points across nor do they drive constructive collaboration and hence stimulate contributions to open source.
* Be clear about who you are representing when responding; are you speaking on behalf of another business or acting in your capacity as an individual community member? Either is fine and both are encouraged. Just make it clear to the reader.
* All contributors and core committers, module maintainers and knowledge sharers are participating in the community in a voluntary nature. Have respect for them and their time when making requests. You may need to exercise some patience.
* Whenever possible, reference your comments to others with example code or links to documentation. This helps people learn and become more experienced community members and developers.
* If you are reducing your input, and potentially stepping away from the community, please remember that others might be relying on your contributions. Be prepared to ensure your contributions remain open and available to the community. Spend some time handing your contributions over to another community member or core contributor to help with the continuity of SilverStripe open source development.
* Conflict may eventuate from time to time. We should all try to view it as a constructive process. Understanding others' positions, without descending into ad hominem attacks, is valuable and may lead to better solutions to problems.
* Involve a 3rd party. If necessary, inform a core committer if a conflict continues to escalate.
* Breaches of the code of conduct by a community member may result in a first reminder about the code of conduct (we realise we're all human and sometimes we have bad days).
* Repeated and deliberate breachings of the code of conduct following this first reminder will be referred on to the team of core committers and may result in the member being asked to leave the community channels.
* While we have a policy of not removing postings and comments from our digital channels, there may be times in which items are removed if deemed blatantly discriminatory towards individuals, groups or cultures.
* Refer to [this helpful guide on conflict resolution](http://www.crnhq.org/files/66138/files/Handouts%20and%20Posters/ResolveTheConflictGuideposter.pdf) to aid you when dealing with a conflict.
* This is a living document. As core committers, we know we don't have all the answers so we want to make the community an innovative and valuable space for everyone that wishes to contribute.
* If you would like to improve the wording, add additional items, or simply fix typos, each contribution to the code of conduct will be considered on it's merit and agreed upon unanimously by the core committers. Any changes will be included in future revisions of the SilverStripe code of conduct.
