Various kinds of social rules
One of the things I’ve seen diffuse across communities are rules for social conduct. I think this is great seeing how much discussion, thought and personal experiences goes into their creation. Once they’ve been defined by one group and context, it’s not uncommon to see other groups take them on for their own use, making omissions and other changes as suits their context best.
I thought I would collect a few of these social rules I’ve come across, in the hopes that it is a useful act of dissemination.
Note: these sections will be written in the voice of the group that coined the social rules being depicted, I did not write them. :)
initially written 2025-10-17
Varia
Varia is a space in Rotterdam, with various configurations of people with proverbial hats such as artists and hackers alike. I’ve never visited Varia, but I have made friends with people who have been big parts of it and I think their rules on acceptable / unacceptable behaviour are great.
The text below comes from https://varia.zone/en/pages/code-of-conduct.html
Varia's acceptable + unacceptable behaviour
Varia's Code of Conduct
About this document
The code of conduct is a set of guidelines that help establish shared values and ensure that behaviour that may harm participants is avoided.
This document equally applies to Varia's members, visitors and contributors, including organizers of events in the space. The document also applies to users and contributors to Varia's on-line channels. When the word "we" is used in this document, it applies to all of the above.
We acknowledge that we come from different backgrounds and all have certain biases and privileges. Therefore, this Code of Conduct cannot account for all the ways that people might feel excluded, unsafe or uncomfortable. We commit to open dialogues, and as such this Code of Conduct is never finished and should change whenever needed. We amend this document over time so it reflects the priorities and sensitivities of Varia as it changes. It is a collective responsibility for all of us to enact the behaviour described in this document, and bring it to the physical and digital space of Varia.
Why a Code of Conduct?
Varia is a complex collective-space. We are a multi-lingual, multi-cultural, multi-disciplinary group. At Varia we mostly speak English and Dutch. We recognize that most members and visitors are not native speakers of these languages. We also recognize that there are multiple ways of speaking and interacting (words, gestures, acts, etc.), depending on cultural backgrounds, educations and practices. As such, we recognize that situations might arise where misunderstandings or conflicts happen. We strive to overcome these misunderstandings through a commitment to open dialogue: we prefer to assume good faith, and ask members, participants or visitors to express their concerns directly to each other when possible. When this is not an option, this Code of Coduct can be consulted for further actions.
Varia is a learning environment. It accommodates a whole range of practices. Working together means bridging gaps: between different practices, levels of technical expertise, personal preferences and political or ethical orientations. We strive to create an environment for participants with different ranges of experience, while allowing complex topics to be discussed.
We want Varia to be a space where all members can develop their practices in a collective setting and people feel safe and comfortable to participate, to express themselves, to learn and to work together. The vulnerable nature of collective work means that uncomfortable situations will occur. These situations ask for mutual respect and care. We hope that everyone participating in Varia is respectful, feels able to be vulnerable and exercises care. In the interest of making an inclusive environment, we will not tolerate harassment, exclusion or any other harmful behaviour.
Expected behaviour
We expect each other to ...
be considerate
be open and generous
be respectful
be responsible
be dedicated
be empathetic,
foster an inclusive environment
Unacceptable behaviour
The following behaviours will not be tolerated within the physical and digital realms of Varia.
No structural or personal discrimination,
No harrassment,
No violation of privacy,
No unwelcome sexual conduct,
No destructive behaviour,
Intervention procedure
We have different, time based procedures.
Immediate intervention (help is needed now!)
If you are feeling unsafe, you can immediately contact the Varia members in the space, or those who are tasked with making sure the code of conduct is respected. These contact people will do their best to help, or to find the correct assistance if relevant/necessary. You can contact either of them by sms/call or email at:
elided for this document, see varia's code of conduct
For example, something happened during a still-ongoing event and needs to be acted upon right away. Action is taken immediately when this violation of the code of conduct is reported. This could involve removing an attendee from an event.
Non-immediate intervention (a situation that requires more time)
Other violations need to be considered and consulted upon with more people or in a more measured way. For example: If you experience an ongoing pattern of harassment; if you witness structurally unacceptable behaviour; if somebody keeps "accidentally" using discriminatory language, after being asked to stop.
If you feel comfortable or able, discuss the issues with the involved parties before consulting a mediator. We prefer to constructively resolve disagreements together and work to change the unacceptable behaviour, when it is possible and safe to do so.
However, if the problems still persist, those who are responsible for enforcing the code of conduct can help you deal with these kinds of problems. Contact the members listed above. Information will be handled with sensitivity.
European Scuttlebutt Collective
The European Scuttlebutt Collective (ESC) was a relatively short-lived group of people trying to further development of Secure Scuttlebutt (SSB), a decentralized protocol. One of the most significant things we did in this group was establishing both a useful voting process and a vouching-based membership procedure.
The procedures below come from https://github.com/scuttlebutt-eu/important-documents/ (voting-process.md and membership.md)
ESC's Voting process
Voting process
When a proposal is submitted to the consortium, the members of the consortium must vote before the proposal passes. All members of the consortium must be notified of the proposal for it to be a valid proposal. Invalid proposal can still be discussed on, but cannot be approved officially. Each member picks one of the four possible options:
y: means "Yes", agrees to the proposal and wants to see it taken into effectw: means "Whatever", does not have an opinion about the proposal and does not want their voice to be counted?: means "Question", when the member needs clarification about the proposal before voting on it!: means "Alternative suggestion", when the member has a counter-proposal to the current proposal
As soon as there is any ! vote, the current proposal is put on hold, and the counter-proposal in the ! vote should be listened to, and voted on like any other proposal. All proposals have the same voting process, so that it's possible to have a chain of !, and along this chain, the original proposal is refined until everyone is satisfied. Or, a discussion takes place until there is no resolution (none of the proposals along the chain pass), indicating an impasse. If there are multiple ! votes for the same decision, the first ! counter-proposal should be listened to and the other counter-proposals are disregarded, but can be resubmitted as ! on the subsequent proposal.
Votes of type ? don't cancel the current proposal, they just ask for clarification from the member who proposed it. After the clarification is given, all members vote again for the same proposal.
The proposal passes if and only if all members have voted within the deadline AND there are at least one y vote, zero ? votes, zero ! votes, and any number of w votes. Deadlines are explained below.
Deadlines
The default deadline for all proposals is 21 days (exactly 21 * 24 hours), after that, members that have not given a vote are considered to have given the w vote. In this way, no proposal would have absentees.
ESC's Vouching-based membership
Membership
Membership Principles
- Financial stake: The collective wishes that each member recurrently contributes financially, with the goal of covering costs for common purposes, such as meetups and others. The contribution amount from each member should be flexible to their financial situation, but we suggest a default contribution amount as a baseline.
- Trust: The collective aims to have a high trust level in the group by seeing each other as individuals as part of contexts. This is achieved by maintaining regular communication, distributing care labour and being mindful of hierarchies that may arise.
- European: be related to European activities.
- Active participation: as a member one actively takes part in the practices that have been agreed upon by the collective.
Membership criteria
- Pay a monthly membership fee, flexible for each member, with a suggested baseline of 10€ (which can be paid in advance for up to 12 months). See financial stake.
- Be actively vouched for by at least 3 active members: A vouch should be initiated by another active member and can later be removed at any time. (see below: "Vouching" for the process, and “Membership Split” for limit cases)
- Have physical or legal presence in Europe, or be involved in an active collective project with at least one member with a physical or legal presence in Europe
- Be a natural person.
- If not a member for the last 12 months:
- Publicly introduced themselves to the existing members (ex: background, motivation, skills, etc.)
- If a member for the last 12 months:
- Voted in the last annual general assembly
- Have volunteered in the last 12 months on tasks required to keep the collective running and reported those contributions
- Have attended at least 1 of the last 3 physical gatherings.
If a member fails to maintain their active status by omitting to fulfill some of the criteria above, they become an “Inactive Member” for up to a year, and lose voting rights. An active member will contact them to understand why. The “Inactive Member” can then choose to: (1) fulfill the criteria to become “Active” again, or (2) become a “Past Member”. In the absence of answer, after one year of “Inactive” status, they automatically become “Past Members”. (see “Recognizing Past Members” below)
After fulfilling the criteria above, new members are added to a Signal group representing the collective. If members fail to maintain their active status, they are removed from the Signal group at the moment they become Inactive.
Vouching
When you vouch for another member, it means: "I trust this person and their abilities to participate fruitfully in the collective. I take on the responsibility of introducing the rules and spirit of the collective, and agree to intermediate if they are part of or cause conflicts."
Vouchings are internal - public within the collective but private from non-members. For now, vouching relies on messages on Signal and your memory. Your responsibility in vouching also includes knowing who else vouches for the same person. Participate in the following ways:
- Add a vouch: internally message the other members of the Signal group mentioning who you are vouching for. This is also a good time to celebrate and express the good things about your new vouchee!
- Remove a vouch: internally message the other members and mention who you stop vouching for. The situation might call for a bit more tact and privacy: if necessary, privately message those who still vouch for that person to discuss a course of action.
- Query: query by messaging other members, internally or privately, about the vouching status of another member.
Membership Split
Some members may stop vouching other members such that membership would split into disjoint groups (often two of them). If one of these groups is larger than all others, that group becomes the official collective. If not, e.g. when it splits into two groups of the same size, the collective is dissolved and its assets are liquidated and transferred to the Secure Scuttlebutt Consortium Open Collective.
The other disjoint groups shall create new collectives with different names.
Recognizing Past Members
Recognition is based on mutual consent:
- Active members are encouraged, but not obliged, to list “Past Members” and a summary of their contributions on the collective’s public website for posterity.
- “Past Members” have the possibility, but no obligation, to be listed publicly on the collective website. Their active consent will be sought by active members that want to recognize them, unless the past members are not able to give that consent anymore. In the latter case, the choice of listing or not the “Past Member” is left to the best judgement of the active members.
Modifying the Membership (this document)
The '(Y)es/(W)hatever/(?)Clarification/(!)Alternative Suggestion' decision process, explained in the Voting Process document, is used to make modifications or complete rewrites of this document.
Lodis chat guidelines
Lodis is a hackerspace in Malmö. One thing we’ve developed is a policy on how to maintain a relatively large group chat of similar but still-disparate people and keep it useful.
The chat guidelines come from a soon-to-be-updated version of https://lodis.se/values.html
Lodis chat guidelines
Communications channels
There is a mailing list for non-members, new, old, and interested people to keep up-to-date of what is happening in the space and around the lodis community. There are also two main group chats for regular visitors. One for lodisar and one for key members. We also have a publicly readable forum where members can sign-up to post.
Communications channel usage
The lodisarna chat and the forum are invite-only, and we typically only let in people who have attended past events. The reason is an attempt to limit the chat size to only include those who are actively engaged with lodis and thereby create a more trusted environment.
We now clarify the intended use of the lodisarna chat, as the number of members in the chat has grown.
If you find yourself in this chat, welcome! We hope you will find it helpful in keeping up with what is happening in the community and make it easier for you to engage with and use the lodis space!
Intended chat use cases
The lodisarna chat is mainly intended for "organisational purposes", such as lodis-related event announcements.
It also exists to give lodisar:
- a way to propose activities
- a starting point for organizing events, which can fork off into other chats/spaces
- a way to share activities or events from other groups that fit with the values and interests of our hackerspace
- a way to share or raise with the community other relevant issues that overlap the hackerspace's interests
Chat guidelines
We ask chat participants to be mindful of the types of posts made, the amount made in a short timespan, the length of posts, and to limit "unnecessary responses" (like sending lol or ok to the entire chat).
A general guideline is that we welcome people sharing noteworthy things, suggestions or questions. Especially if they pertain to organizing around lodis. However, we ask people to be mindful of long and detailed (follow-up) discussions.
Enforcement of guidelines
If key members feel that the activity in the chat is moving beyond the intended uses or that the guidelines are being ignored, they will speak out. This is not personal, but about bringing the scope of the chat back and the volume of messages down. We will also speak out if our Code of Conduct (see section above: values / värdegrund) is violated in some way.
Lodis only takes responsibility for its own chats
Any participant in the lodisarna chat is welcome to share or suggest other places for socializing digitally, but they won't be considered part of lodis and none of the key members take responsibility for moderating them.
Use the forum
Feel free to socialize using the forum! Lacking intrusive notifcations, and featuring a format more suitable for slower discussions, it is less likely to cause and escalate misunderstandings in the same manner as live-chat.
Recurse Center
Recurse Center is a company and and educational community in New York City whose Social Rules has been a big inspiration for many other projects.
Recurse Center’s social rules can be found at https://www.recurse.com/social-rules
RC has four social rules. They help create a friendly, intellectual environment where you can spend as much of your energy as possible on programming. The social rules are: The social rules name subtle behaviors that put other people down or show how much we know instead of supporting each other’s learning. They work together with the self-directives to make RC an even better place to learn and grow. For example, working at the edge of your abilities requires taking emotional risks, and the social rules help create an environment where it’s safe to do that. Letting someone know that they impacted you by breaking a social rule and accepting that feedback gracefully when you’re the one who messed up are important ways to learn generously. This allows everyone to keep working and growing together. our code of conduct, which covers behaviors that are never acceptable, like abuse, discrimination, and harassment. A well-actually is when you correct someone about something that’s not relevant to the conversation or tangential to what they’re trying to say.1 They’re bad because they aren’t helpful, break the flow of conversation, and focus attention on the person making the well actually. This rule can be a bit tricky because there isn’t a clear line between relevant to the conversation and not. Sometimes your correction might actually be necessary, and it could still come off as annoying when you make it. The best rule of thumb is, if you’re not sure whether something needs to be said right now, hold off and see what happens. You can always say it later if it turns out there’s no way for the conversation to move forward without your correction. Feigned surprise is when you act surprised when someone doesn’t know something. Responding with surprise in this situation makes people feel bad for not knowing things and less likely to ask questions in the future, which makes it harder for them to learn. No feigning surprise isn’t a great name. When someone acts surprised when you don’t know something, it doesn’t matter whether they’re pretending to be surprised or actually surprised. The effect is the same: the next time you have a question, you’re more likely to keep your mouth shut. An accurate name for this rule would be no acting surprised when someone doesn’t know something, but it’s a mouthful, and at this point, the current name has stuck. Backseat driving is when you lob advice from across the room (or across the online chat) without really joining or engaging in a conversation. Because you haven’t been participating in the conversation, it’s easy to miss something important and give advice that’s not actually helpful. Even if your advice is correct, it’s rude to bust into a conversation without asking. If you overhear a conversation where you could be helpful, the best thing to do is to ask to join. Subtle -isms are subtle expressions of racism, sexism, ageism, homophobia, transphobia and other kinds of bias and prejudice. They are small things that make others feel unwelcome, things that we all sometimes do by mistake. Subtle -isms make people feel like they don’t belong at RC. We want to create an environment where everyone can focus all their energy on programming. It’s hard to do that if you’re regularly being made to wonder whether you belong. Subtle -isms can also be things that you do instead of say. This includes things like boxing out the only woman at the whiteboard during a discussion or assuming someone isn’t a programmer because of their race or gender. The fourth social rule is more complicated than the others. Not everyone agrees on what constitutes a subtle -ism. Subtle -isms are baked into society in ways that can make them hard to recognize. And not everyone experiences subtle -isms in the same way: subtle homophobia won’t hurt someone who’s straight in the same way it hurts someone who’s gay. There’s another part of no subtle -isms: all discussions of -isms and politics at RC should be opt-in, like in the politics channel on Zulip, in a one-on-one conversation, or in a clearly described event in a private room at the Hub and/or on Zoom. Conversations about -isms can be distracting and draining, especially for people from marginalized groups, and what's an intellectual exercise for one person can have real material consequences for another. The point of this rule isn’t censorship, but consent; it allows everyone to choose when, where, and with whom they’d like to have potentially difficult conversations. There are many places to discuss and debate these issues, but there are few where people can avoid them. RC is one of those places. The social rules are lightweight. You should not be afraid of breaking a social rule. These are things that everyone does, and breaking one doesn’t make you a bad person. If someone says, "hey, you just feigned surprise," or "that’s subtly sexist," don’t worry. Just apologize, reflect for a second, and move on. The social rules aren’t for punishing people. They help make RC a pleasant environment where you are free to be yourself, tackle things outside your comfort zone, and focus on programming. The social rules don’t cover harassment or discrimination. For that, we have a separate code of conduct enforced by the RC faculty. All members of the RC community are expected to abide by our code of conduct. As far as we know, Miguel de Icaza coined the term well-actually.↩Recurse Center’s social rules
How do they work?
Code of conduct