dbt Community Code of Conduct

dbt has a supportive, active community of thousands of smart, kind, and helpful people who share a commitment to elevating the analytics profession.

You can get involved in the dbt community by connecting at events, getting or giving help in any of our many channels, contributing to dbt or a dbt package, and many other ways.

People genuinely love this community, and we are committed to maintaining the spirit of it. As such have written this Code of Conduct to help all participants understand how to best participate in our community.

The Code of Conduct applies to all dbt Community spaces both online and off. This includes: Slack, Discourse, code repositories (dbt Core, dbt packages etc), Office Hours and Meetups. There are some guidelines specific to particular forums (listed below). Participants are responsible for knowing and abiding by this Code of Conduct.

This Code of Conduct has three sections:

• dbt Community Values: These values apply to all of our community spaces, and all of our guidelines are based on these values.
• Forum-specific guidelines: These guidelines explain some of the cultural norms that apply to specific forums.
• Anti-harassment policy: We are dedicated to providing a harassment-free experience for everyone in our community — here, we outline exactly what that means.

We appreciate your support in continuing to build a community we’re all proud of.

— The dbt Community Admin Team.

dbt Community Values

Be respectful.

We want everyone to have a fulfilling and positive experience in the dbt Community and we are continuously grateful in your help ensuring that this is the case.

Be courteous, respectful, and polite to fellow community members. Generally, don’t be a jerk.

Be considerate of others’ time — many people in the community generously give their time for free.

Ways to demonstrate this value:

• Take the time to write bug reports well (example)
• Thank people if they help solve a problem.

Be you.

Some developer communities allow and even encourage anonymity — we prefer it when people identify themselves clearly. It helps to build empathy, and form relationships.

Ways to demonstrate this value:

• Update your profile on any dbt Community forums to include your name, and a clear picture. On Slack, use the “what I do” section to add your role title and current company
• Write in your own voice, and offer your own advice, rather than speaking in your company’s marketing or support voice.

Encourage diversity and participation.

People with different mindsets and experiences, working together, create better outcomes. This includes diversity of race and gender, as well as the diversity of academic and career backgrounds, socio-economic backgrounds, geographic backgrounds, ideologies, and interests.

Ways to demonstrate this value:

• Make everyone in our community feel welcome, regardless of their background, and do everything possible to encourage participation in our community.
• Demonstrate empathy for a community member’s experience — not everyone comes from the same career background, so adjust answers accordingly.
• If you are sourcing speakers for events, put in additional effort to find speakers from underrepresented groups.

Create more value than you capture.

Each community member should strive to create more value in the community than they capture. This is foundational to being a community.

Ways to demonstrate this value:

• Contribute to dbt or a dbt package
• Participate in discussions on Slack and Discourse
• Share things you have learned on Discourse
• Host events

Be mindful that others may not want their image or name on social media, and when attending or hosting an in-person event, ask permission prior to posting about another person.

Be curious.

Always ask yourself “why?” and strive to be continually learning.

Ways to demonstrate this value:

• Try solving a problem yourself before asking for help, e.g. rather than asking “what happens when I do X”, experiment and observe the results!
• When asking questions, explain the “why” behind your decisions, e.g. “I’m trying to solve X problem, by writing Y code. I’m getting Z problem”
• When helping someone else, explain why you chose that solution, or if no solution exists, elaborate on the reason for that, e.g. “That’s not possible in dbt today — but here’s a workaround / check out this GitHub issue for a relevant discussion”

Guidelines

Participating in Slack

dbt Slack is where the dbt community hangs out, discusses issues, and troubleshoots problems together. It is not a support service — please do not treat it like one.

We also have a number of cultural norms in our Slack community. You must read and agree to the rules before joining Slack, but you can also find them here.

As a short summary:

• Rule 1: Be respectful
• Rule 2: Use the right channel
• Rule 3: Put effort into your question
• Rule 4: Do not double-post
• Rule 5: Keep it in public channels
• Rule 6: Do not solicit members of our Slack
• Rule 7: Do not demand attention with @channel and @here, or by tagging individuals
• Rule 8: Use threads

Vendor guidelines

If you are a vendor (i.e. you represent an organization that sells a product or service relevant to our community), then there are additional guidelines you should be aware of.

Most importantly — do not solicit members of our community as lead generation. You can find the rest of these here.

Guideline violations — 3 strikes method

The point of our guidelines is not to find opportunities to punish people, but we do need a fair way to deal with people who do harm to our community. Violations related to our anti-harassment policy (below) will be addressed immediately and are not subject to 3 strikes.

1. First occurrence: We’ll give you a friendly, but public, reminder that the behavior is inappropriate according to our guidelines.
2. Second occurrence: We’ll send you a private message with a warning that any additional violations will result in removal from the community.
3. Third occurrence: Depending on the violation, we might need to delete or ban your account.

Notes:

• Obvious spammers are banned on first occurrence.
• Participation in the dbt Community is a privilege — we reserve the right to remove people from the community.
• Violations are forgiven after 6 months of good behavior, and we won’t hold a grudge.
• People who are committing minor formatting / style infractions will get some education, rather than hammering them in the 3 strikes process.
• Contact conduct@getdbt.com to report abuse or appeal violations. In the case of appeals, we know that mistakes happen, and we’ll work with you to come up with a fair solution if there has been a misunderstanding.

Anti-harassment policy

Further to our guidelines for participating in the community in a positive manner, we are also dedicated to providing a harassment-free experience for everyone. We do not tolerate harassment of participants in any form.

Harassment includes:

• Offensive comments related to gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, mental illness, neuro(a)typicality, physical appearance, body size, age, race, or religion.
• Unwelcome comments regarding a person’s lifestyle choices and practices, including those related to food, health, parenting, drugs, and employment.
• Deliberate misgendering or use of ‘dead’ or rejected names.
• Gratuitous or off-topic sexual images or behaviour in spaces where they’re not appropriate.
• Physical contact and simulated physical contact (eg, textual descriptions like “hug” or “backrub”) without consent or after a request to stop.
• Threats of violence.
• Incitement of violence towards any individual, including encouraging a person to commit suicide or to engage in self-harm.
• Deliberate intimidation.
• Stalking or following.
• Harassing photography or recording, including logging online activity for harassment purposes.
• Sustained disruption of discussion.
• Unwelcome sexual attention.
• Pattern of inappropriate social contact, such as requesting/assuming inappropriate levels of intimacy with others
• Continued one-on-one communication after requests to cease.
• Deliberate “outing” of any aspect of a person’s identity without their consent except as necessary to protect vulnerable people from intentional abuse.
• Publication of non-harassing private communication.

The dbt Community prioritizes marginalized people’s safety over privileged people’s comfort. The dbt Community Admin team reserves the right not to act on complaints regarding:

• ‘Reverse’ -isms, including ‘reverse racism,’ ‘reverse sexism,’ and ‘cisphobia’
• Reasonable communication of boundaries, such as “leave me alone,” “go away,” or “I’m not discussing this with you.”
• Communicating in a ‘tone’ you don’t find congenial
• Criticizing racist, sexist, cissexist, or otherwise oppressive behavior or assumptions

Reporting harassment

If you are being harassed by a member of the dbt Community, notice that someone else is being harassed, or have any other concerns, please contact us at community@dbtlabs.com.

We will respect confidentiality requests for the purpose of protecting victims of abuse. At our discretion, we may publicly name a person about whom we’ve received harassment complaints, or privately warn third parties about them, if we believe that doing so will increase the safety of dbt community members or the general public. We will not name harassment victims without their affirmative consent.

Consequences

Participants asked to stop any harassing behavior are expected to comply immediately.

If a participant engages in harassing behavior, the dbt Community Admin team may take any action they deem appropriate, up to and including expulsion from all dbt Community spaces and identification of the participant as a harasser to other dbt Community members or the general public.

Credits

Credit to 01.org, Tizen.org, and Geek Feminism for some of the wording used in this Code of Conduct.