At Ruby Together, we are very proud of the culture that has emerged around the Ruby programming language. However, we also acknowledge that our community still has progress to make with regard to being welcoming and accepting of different kinds of contributors, be they women, people of color, people on the LGBT spectrum, or other underrepresented populations.
One of the ways to signal that an open source community is welcoming is to adopt a formal code of conduct. Codes of conduct, which started primarily as a means of improving conferences and other events, have gained traction over the past year with open source projects as well. The Contributor Covenant is one of the most popular of these codes of conduct, and has been adopted by dozens of open source projects including Bundler, GitLab, AngularJS, rubygems.org, and RubyBench.
Being overt in our openness is a first step toward making the Ruby community a better place. It is in this spirit that Ruby Together is announcing a new policy regarding open source Ruby projects that we will support: to be eligible, a project must have a clear and enforceable code of conduct that applies to all contributors and maintainers, and project owners must make a commitment to ensuring that the policies laid out by that code of conduct are enforced.
We as a community have created something special, and it’s our responsibility to ensure that our core values are clearly communicated and shared by everyone. We hope that only supporting projects with a code of conduct is a positive step toward this goal.
— André, Coraline Ada, and the Ruby Together team