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Switch to using the NumFOCUS Code of Conduct #10432

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@shoyer shoyer commented Jun 18, 2025

When Xarray joined NumFOCUS in 2018, we adopted the "Contributor Covenant" Code of Conduct because that was recommended by NumFOCUS, and having a Code of Conduct was a requirement for NumFOCUS affiliation. Our code of conduct suggests contacting the core project team to report any issues, but in practice we have never had a code of conduct report.

Recently, NumFOCUS introduced a standard NumFOCUS code of conduct, which it has encourraged all NumFOCUS projects to adopt. In practice, the main difference is that the NumFOCUS Code of Conduct Working Group would handle all reports, rather than Xarray's project core team. We have the option to either have the Working Group recommendations (with final decisions by Xarray project leadership) or to let the Working Group make binding decisions themselves.

I recommend that Xarray adopt the NumFOCUS Code of Conduct, with the NumFOCUS Code of Conduct Working Group making final decisions:

  1. The Code of Conduct Working Group is better prepared to handle Code of Conduct reports than Xarray's project leadership, because they handle code of conduct reports regularly.
  2. If any Code of Conduct violations did arise, they could likely involve some core project team members, which makes our current structure of reporting violating to the core team problematic. In addition, our core team is fairly large (20+ members with various levels of activity), which preserving anonymity hard to guarantee.
  3. Xarray does not have an established formal governance structure, which could make making final decisions ourselves in any contentious situations challenging.

CC @pydata/xarray for visibility.

Consider indicating your support or any concerns via emoticon responses to this post (e.g. 👍 )

@benbovy
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benbovy commented Jun 19, 2025

In general I very much agree with your recommendations @shoyer! I just wanted to raise some minor concerns or questions, though.

(note: I clearly lack of experience on this matter and I should probably have read more carefully NumFOCUS's code of conduct before commenting here! I also don't think that the concerns below should be addressed now).


We have the option to either have the Working Group recommendations (with final decisions by Xarray project leadership) or to let the Working Group make binding decisions themselves.

Is there any possible option in between? With the option that the CoC Working Group both handles the report + makes the final decisions, there's a risk (although very unlikely I guess) that the Xarray leadership (as loosely defined) may disagree with those decisions, or at least that the conclusions of the Working Group may not reflect the general opinion of the Xarray leadership. How would we handle that? There has been some challenging situations in the past, although I guess that since then things have improved to prevent such situation to happen again?


IIUC further changes proposed to the CoC will be voted among the Working Group before being approved (or rejected) by the NumFOCUS Board. Project leadership doesn't seem to be involved in the process in any way. Is that concerning for us?

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