The actions of an individual can have meaningful and lasting impact on our
community.
I have been reflecting on how we treat each other and captured some of my
thoughts in a post that I published to our blog tonight. Please read this
email and the blog post http://www.getchef.com/blog/?p=12380.
Our community is a collection of individuals that share a fellowship with
one another. It is a community built on generosity, professionalism,
friendship, and hugs.
But we aren’t perfect. Each of us is human and prone to mistakes and
missteps. When this happens, we must take the time and energy to learn
from these mistakes and do what we can to prevent them in the future.
It can be easy to quickly transform emotions into a 140 character message
or even a longer form comment or email. Please remember that there are
human beings on the other side of those @'s, reading those comments, and
receiving those emails. Is this something that you would say to that
person if you were standing in front of him or her?
Today one of our most prolific community members announced his decision to
leave Chef and go on a software engineering sabbatical, in part because of
how he was treated by a few members in our community. As a company, Chef
takes the safety and security of our employees extremely seriously.
Further, it is our heartfelt desire to have a community where diverse
opinion is welcome and where members feel safe and secure to engage in
healthy, and sometimes spirited, dialog with the mutual goal of creating
value and growing as professionals and human beings. As a community, we
need to use this event as a moment to reflect on how we treat each other.
We have just written a post on the Chef blog (
http://www.getchef.com/blog/?p=12380) that discusses this subject a bit
more. I invite you to read that post and comment via whichever forum you
think is most appropriate.
Thank you for participating in these conversations. Here are some immediate
actions you can take to help us improve the community.
- Behave responsibly and help us address unacceptable behavior when it
occurs. - Participate in the RFC to rewrite our community guidelines.
- Join us at the next Chef Developers’ IRC Meeting to discuss the RFC.
- Join us at one of our upcoming Chef Community Summit events to discuss
this topic in person with other community members.
Together we will make our community stronger.
Thank you,
Nathen
@nathenharvey
+1 202.368.7264