Code of conduct

Be civil and assume good faith. Technical disagreement is welcome; personal remarks are not.

That is the whole rule. The rest of this page is what it means in practice and who decides, because a code of conduct whose enforcement is unstated is decoration.

What is expected

• Argue about the work. "This breaks linkage when a record is purged" is a contribution. "You clearly do not understand hash chains" is not, and it is also less useful, because it does not say what breaks.
• Say the inconvenient thing. This project's entire argument is that evidence should not overstate what it proves. A review that points out an overclaim in the documentation, a test that asserts something it does not check, or a threat model row crediting the wrong control is doing the work this repository exists to do. Expect it to be welcomed, including about the maintainers' own commits.
• Take correction plainly. Being wrong in public about a technical detail costs nothing here. Defending a wrong detail because it was yours costs the reader.

What is not

Harassment, sustained personal attacks, demeaning comments about who somebody is rather than what they wrote, unwelcome sexual attention, publishing private information, and deliberate disruption of a thread. Posting a security vulnerability in a public issue is not a conduct matter but it is still the wrong channel: SECURITY.md has the private ones.

Scope

Everywhere this project happens — issues, pull requests, discussions, commit messages, and any space where somebody is representing the project.

Enforcement

Report a problem to tunc@valqore.io, with [qed conduct] in the subject. Reports are read by the maintainers only. If a report concerns a maintainer, say so, and expect that maintainer to be recused from deciding it — with one maintainer (GOVERNANCE.md) that currently means an outside reviewer is asked instead, because a person adjudicating a complaint about themselves is not a process.

The maintainers will respond, and may edit or remove comments, close threads, or block contributors. That decision is theirs and is not relitigated in the thread it concerns. What you will get is a reason.

Not borrowed

This is deliberately not the Contributor Covenant. The Covenant is a fine document and adopting it unread is a worse signal than writing a shorter one that the maintainers will actually apply. If a case arises that this page does not cover, it will be decided on the first rule at the top and this page will be amended afterwards to say what was decided.