Procedure for making a Code of Conduct report

If you believe someone has violated the Elastic Code of Conduct, we encourage you to report it. If you are unsure whether the incident is a violation, or whether the space where it happened is covered by this Code of Conduct, we still encourage you to report it. We are fine with receiving reports where we decide to take no action for the sake of creating a safer community.

Each Elastic event will include a phone number to make a Code of Conduct report. If you are attending a local Elastic event, please contact an event organizer to make a report.

For Elastic online communities, you can make a report via email to <[email protected]>.

The email <[email protected]> reaches all of the Elastic Code of Conduct committee members:

• Andrae Middleton
• Andrew Grant
• Anna Ossowski
• Brian Curtin
• Daliya Spasova
• Elyssa Emrich
• Fabio Busatto
• Katherine Thiel
• Kiley Davidson
• Leah Sutton
• Manja Wittig
• Mark Walkom
• Nik Everett
• Raya Fratkina
• Sarah Etter
• Shaun Mc Gough
• Shay Banon
• Yaduvendra Singh
• Yaniv Eliash

If you make a report via email or phone, we hope you can provide us with some information that will help us identify the reported person. If you don’t remember all the details, we still encourage you to make a report.

We encourage you to include the following information in your report:

• Your contact info (so we can get in touch with you if we need to follow up)
• Date and time of the incident
• Location of incident
• Whether the incident is ongoing
• Description of the incident
• Additional circumstances surrounding the incident
• Other people involved in or witnesses to the incident and their contact information or description

For an incident that occurred at an event, we encourage you to include the following information:

• Any identifying details you remember about the reported person, such as name, physical appearance, height, clothing, voice accent, or identifying badge information like company name, ribbons, or social media handles

For an incident that occurred in an online community, we encourage you to include the following information:

• Identifying information of the reported person such as name, online username, handle, email address, or IP address
• Which community and which part of the online community space it occurred in
• A link to the conversation
• Any logs or screenshots of the conversation

All reports will be kept confidential. When the Code of Conduct committee members discuss incidents with people who are reported, we will anonymize details as much as we can to protect reporter privacy.

However, some incidents happen in one-on-one interactions, and even if the details are anonymized, the reported person may be able to guess who made the report. If you have concerns about retaliation or your personal safety, please note those in your report. We still encourage you to report, so that we can support you while keeping our community members safe. In some cases, we can compile several anonymized reports into a pattern of behavior, and take action on that pattern.

In some cases we may determine that a public statement will need to be made. If that's the case, the identities of all people impacted by the behavior and the people who reported that behavior will remain confidential, unless those individuals instruct us otherwise.

When you make a report in-person to an incident responder, they will gather information about the incident according to the Elastic Incident Response Procedure.

When you make an incident report via email or phone, you will receive an acknowledgment of your report within 24 hours of making the report.

The Elastic Code of Conduct committee will meet to determine an appropriate response to your report. Examples of possible incident responses are outlined in the Elastic Incident Response Procedure. In some cases, committee members may need to ask the person who made the report additional questions about the incident.

If a Code of Conduct committee member has a conflict of interest for a report, they will recuse themselves from the discussion and handling of the incident. The incident documentation will not be available to them, and they will excuse themselves from any conversations involving handling the incident.

Within one week of an incident report, the Elastic Code of Conduct committee will follow up with the person who made the report. The follow up may include:

• An acknowledgment that the Elastic Code of Conduct committee discussed the situation
• Whether or not the report was determined to be a violation of the Code of Conduct
• What actions (if any) were taken to correcting the reporter behavior

Sometimes reports take more time to discuss or follow up on. After one week of a report being open, the person who made the report will be provided with a status update. The status update will include a time frame for when the next update will be sent or the time frame in which the report is expected to be resolved.

The Elastic Code of Conduct team will release quarterly public transparency reports.

The transparency reports will remove any information about the reporter and the reported person. If there is no way to anonymize the report without revealing the identity of the reporter or the reported person, the transparency report will simply note that a report was made.

Transparency reports will include:

• A description of how the Code of Conduct was promoted to community members
• A summary of the total number and types of incidents that have occurred since the last transparency report
• A summary of the resolutions to those incidents, including unresolved incidents
• A generalized description of each incident, and how the incident was resolved

The Elastic Incident Reporter Guide is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license. It was updated by Sage Sharp of Otter Tech. Our Incident Reporter Guide was inspired by and borrows content from plans by other open source projects and events, including:

• Geek Feminism wiki's guide to responding to reports
• PyCon U.S. 2018 Reporter Guide
• Django Project reporting guidelines
• Otter Tech's Code of Conduct Template

Examples of transparency reports:

• PyCon United States conference 2018
• PyCon Australia conference 2018
• DjangoCon Europe conference 2018
• Code for America Summit 2018
• Write the Docs Europe conference 2016
• Symfony online community report for 2018