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ALA's Code of Conduct - Next Steps

  • 1.  ALA's Code of Conduct - Next Steps

    Posted Jun 15, 2021 11:13 AM
    Hello and thank you for the feedback you gave us on the ALA Code of Conduct. This is a status update to let you know where we are and what to expect next. Here's a link to the public version of the final draft.

    Our Draft Code of Conduct received 330 comments from 60 named people and 85 anonymous people. We very much appreciate you helping us with this project. The feedback was very useful, but didn't always agree. This is to be expected and the CoC is supposed to be a living document, revised when needed. We did however want to offer a place where people could hear a bit more about our process and some decisions we made.

    When possible when we were looking at a section that was about a specific group of people we tried to reach out to people from that group for feedback. This was especially true when we were using specific terminology in the CoC that we wanted to be accurate and clear, so we used citizenship status instead of immigration status, for example, after feedback from readers that immigration status was  a term often used in the United States but not as much outside the US.

    We wanted to offer examples but not be prescriptive. We wanted to not use "in group" terminology for a document that wasn't always speaking exclusively from within that group--such as the term deadname, covered, we felt, by telling people to use people's chosen name and pronouns without using a term that some felt was not appropriate in this use case.

    Since we are library workers, we wanted to make explicit that the list of things disallowed from being the subject of negative commentary should all be read as if the are being ORed and not ANDed. Each individual item is problematic, there doesn't have to be a combination of things to hit some harassment threshold. We know the list starts out somewhat negative, i.e. "DON'T DO THIS" but we felt it was important to make a strong statement about what is not allowed and then expand upon more nuanced aspects of what types of communication are encouraged and also discouraged.

    We specifically removed commentary referring to "professional" behavior and replaced it with "respectful." We understand that the concept of professional behavior has been and is being used as a silencing tactic particularly against BIPOC library workers and we did not want the CoC to be used in this way. We also removed some language that suggested that it was the responsibility of someone feeling harassed to give a charitable reading of a comment that was offensive to them. ALA has professional staff as well as members who can help, it's not on users to educate other users if they do not want to, which is part of what this new CoC hopes to address.

    Some aspects of the CoC are guided by the legal and business goals of ALA and we tried to make those situations clear. The ALA Executive Board will have an opportunity to offer input when it votes on whether to adopt our draft CoC this month. Likewise, ALA Council will vote this month on the creation of a new standing committee to administer the CoC.

    Most importantly, the Code of Conduct will be reviewed annually both in how it's applied as well as how it could be improved. The new committee of ALA members will receive feedback, develop transparent procedures for handling incidents on different platforms, review reports and determine sanctions, and ultimately revise this document in the future. Thank you again for helping us with this process.

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    Jessamyn West
    Chapter Councilor - Vermont
    she/her
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