Code of Conduct
The N-Body Shop collaboration strives to provide an inclusive and safe environment for all of itsmembers. We welcome the inclusion of people with diverse skills, backgrounds, experiences, and opinions and recognize that such diversity is critical to the realization of our scientific endeavors. It is our priority that all group members are heard and feel confident in freely expressing their opinions. We also recognize the important value of mentorship and the obligation of our more senior members to actively support the scientific and career aspirations of our younger members. To encourage the cultivation of such an inclusive and productive environment, we have formulated the following code of conduct to which all members of the collaboration are expected to adhere. Resources and guidelines for further cultivating this environment is included in our Best Practices document. When applicable, N-body Shop members will adhere to these guidelines when interacting with the community outside of our collaboration. This includes, but is not limited to, interactions at conferences, academic talks/seminars/colloquia, and public outreach events.
- We treat all people with respect, regardless of race, gender identity, sex, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, nationality, ethnicity, immigration status, age, or religion. This collaboration will be a bullying- and harassment-free environment. Harassment of any kind is not tolerated. This includes sustained disruption of talks or other events, inappropriate physical contact, sexual attention or innuendo, deliberate intimidation, stalking, and photography or recording of an individual without consent. It also includes offensive comments related to gender, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race or religion, or any other exclusionary comments or jokes.
- When transgressions occur, we will provide critical feedback to others in a way that is constructive and respectful. Likewise we will be open to critical feedback, including and especially from those less senior than us. This includes both feedback on science and/or code development, as well as feedback on behavior and/or mentorship.
- Faculty/PIs will make attendance to conferences that emphasize Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) and their scientific identities (e.g. SACNAS and NSBP in the USA) a central priority with the overt goal of reinforcing/establishing pipelines to further the representation of BIPOC at their host institutions, as well as within our collaboration and the astronomy/astrophysics community as a whole.
- Faculty/PIs or any other
collaboration member that supervises students shall be clear about
what financial support they can provide their advisees. This
includes, but may not be limited to, travel funding and salary.
Travel funding for students, particularly to present their work,
will be highly prioritized by Faculty/PIs and included in their
grant proposals.
- Advisors and/or mentors will
maintain constructive, supportive, and timely
lines of communication with their advisees, ensuring that the
advisees are aware of the status of their work. Issues in the
working relationship between advisers and advisees will be
addressed by the advisor in a timely fashion (see best practices
document for further guidelines). Advisors will be open to critique
from their students/mentees and strive to outwardly demonstrate
this vulnerability. Advisors shall support their advisees in
academic and departmental matters, acting as their
confidant.
- Research group meetings, as well as
meetings involving the entire collaboration, will be places where
we respect and acknowledge each other’s humanity. This
acknowledgement includes (but is not limited to) providing a
safe space for group members to discuss
topics not directly related to the group/collaboration’s research
goals. This also includes discussions related to the culture of the
group/collaboration..
- We will respect the scientific work of
others, both within the collaboration and without, through written
acknowledgement and/or appropriate citations within papers. We will
accept requests by original authors for such appropriate
acknowledgment. When utilizing code written by
active group members, they will be consulted with prior to
publication and offered appropriate authorship on the
paper. In the case of
non-active group members, each member will be consulted as to what
role they would like in future publications, and we will adhere to
their wishes.
- Code development by collaboration members
which is performed on separate git
branches/forks will be treated as proprietary.
Such code will not be made public in any way nor used by any group
member without the explicit consent of the code author, or any
proxy which they have explicitly assigned to act on their
behalf. Code that is merged with the main
branch of private N-Body Shop github repositories will
be assumed to be openly accessible to the members of the
collaboration. Only when code is merged with the
main branch of the public repositories will it be considered open
for public use. All code development should
be done with the goal of eventually merging first with the private
main branch, and then with the public branch of the repository in
question.
- We care about cultivating an inclusive
culture beyond our collaboration and encouraging the wider
community to adopt better practices. To this end, we will publicly
call out conferences which either do not have codes of conduct, or
fail to adhere to and/or adequately enforce them. Furthermore, when
not harmful to the academic trajectory of the participant, we
encourage the boycott of any conference which does not have a code
of conduct explicitly rejecting harassment and bullying of all
forms. When attending conferences, senior members in particular
will call out behavior which is inappropriate/against that event’s
code of conduct through the appropriate
channels.
It is crucial that this code of conduct is enforced by members, particularly more senior members, in the N-body Shop collaboration. To this end we have comprised the following resources and guidelines for those that witness - or are actively harmed by - behavior that is inconsistent with this code of conduct. We note that much of the points outlined in the code of conduct above can and should apply outside of our collaboration and we will strive to work to instill these values in our wider academic community.
- A rotating committee of collaboration
members [a]-- consisting of
2 graduate students, 2 postdocs, and 2 faculty
members -- will be responsible for
addressing violations of the code of conduct. Committee members are
expected to recuse themselves from incidents in which they perceive
a conflict of interest. The reporting individual(s) can also ask
for certain committee members to be excused from addressing their
specific incident and this will be done. When committee members are
excused from handling an incident, another collaboration member of
similar seniority, when possible, should take their
place.
- Any N-body Shop member that witnesses
events of bullying, harassment, or any form of aggression toward
anyone should first approach the affected person to show support
and check on their wellbeing. The witness may suggest the affected
person report the behavior (see below) or offer to do so on their
behalf. The affected person alone should determine what actions
they feel comfortable taking, or which are taken on their behalf,
related to this event. Affected/witness parties
should consider reaching out for outside help when either or both
do not feel equipped to handle the situation. One major resource
for this will be a rotating committee of collaboration members
dedicated to helping with these
situations.
- Collaboration members shall be
open to criticism on their behavior. With this in mind, it is
encouraged that those directly affected by - or witnesses to (with
appropriate permission; see above) - any violation of the code of
conduct first attempt to address the offense with the offender
directly.
- We will strive to mitigate the risks
involved in the reporting of incidents in violation of our code of
conduct. An anonymous reporting system will be
made available to collaboration members. The system
will send reports to a rotating committee of collaboration members
(see below). The option will be given to report to a subset of this
committee, though by default the entire committee will receive all
reports of code of conduct violations.
- Retribution of any form against anyone reporting a code of conduct violation will be seen as a malicious act and handled accordingly (see below for consequences).
Consequences for violating the code of conduct.
- We recognize that each
collaboration member’s host institution will have their own
requirements for mandatory reporting and procedures for
investigation and punishment. Such processes may also have
requirements that such matters not be discussed openly. As a
collaboration, we will respect and defer to these guidelines when
applicable.
- The rotating committee will be tasked with determining the appropriate course of action for each reported violation of the code of conduct. Throughout this process, the affected individual(s), if their identity is known, will be consulted to ensure that any action taken on their behalf, and against the other party, is consistent with their wishes and does not jeopardize their career prospects, their physical and/or emotional well being.
- For first offenses, if it is determined that a reasonable observer would recognize the problematic behavior in question as the result of ignorance and/or misunderstanding and not malice, then the committee will approach the person in question to discuss the situation. In this case it will be assumed that the person in question is open to opportunities for behavioral growth through constructive feedback. The committee will approach this person with both respect and honesty about their actions and their consequences. These conversations will be expected to remain private and will not be publicly known to other collaboration members beyond the offending individual(s), the affected individual(s), and the committee members.
- For more serious offenses (including repeated “minor” offenses previously addressed with feedback) where a reasonable observer would recognize that an action was done with malicious intent against the affected individual(s), the committee will determine the appropriate course of action. Such situations include repeated actions that would, in isolation, be seen as non-malicious, and have been addressed with the process of #3. Possible courses of action will vary depending on the exact situation and severity of the infraction. These may include:
- A formal condemnation and
warning
- Formal reporting to the home institution of the offending individual
- Temporary or permanent expulsion
from collaboration-sponsored events and meetings
- Temporary or permanent revocation of permission to use specific proprietary data and/or code
- Temporary or permanent expulsion from the collaboration entirely
- For all incidents, the person
accused of behavior inconsistent with our collaboration’s values
will be allowed to share their perspective with the committee
members handling their situation. This will be done before any
course of action has been decided.
- When sanctions are imparted on the offending individual(s), it is left up to the discretion of the rotating committee and the affected individual(s) as to whether the sanctions and the reasons for them are made public to the rest of the collaboration.