July 1, 2019

Hi everyone,

Last week, when providing feedback to one of our speakers, we did a poor job of making it clear that the feedback was not a warning for being in violation of our Code of Conduct.

To protect the privacy of all involved, we don't comment publicly about Code of Conduct incidents unless it is deemed necessary for the safety of the community. In this case, the conversation was not a report or incident, and we regret that we didn’t communicate clearly about the context of the discussion and compounded the situation with a lack of detail in follow-up communications.

We truly value our speakers and want to apologize for causing hurt and confusion. We know that speakers give time and energy to our event and we failed in helping them feel welcomed and appreciated.

Our goal at Donut.js is to create the most inclusive and welcoming environment possible. Rather than a strict set of rules to enforce punitively, our Code of Conduct is a starting point for building safer communities—a responsibility shared by everyone present, including attendees, speakers, sponsors, and staff. As such, beyond incident handling, our Code of Conduct responders sometimes take proactive steps as community advisors to encourage and bolster event inclusivity. We didn’t specify the capacity we were speaking in, and we apologize.

We have reached out in apology to the speaker involved and are taking steps to ensure that this does not happen again:

• Our Code of Conduct now includes information about the role of our responder.
• In future discussions, we will be explicit about whether a conversation is centered on a recommendation versus an incident report.
• At our next event, we will provide the additional context around both our Code of Conduct and the Code of Conduct responder.

We recognize that we still have room to grow. We messed up, we are sorry, and we will always work to do better.

With apologies,
The Donut.js team