Spacemacs Community

Table of ContentsClose

1. Philosophy
- 1.1. For Contributors
- 1.2. For Users
2. Moderation

1. Philosophy

1.1. For Contributors

This community is a community of hackers based on meritocracy and volunteering. Hackers strive for excellence to make the world a better place, so does the Spacemacs community.
Be good in what you bring to the project be it code, documentation, typo fixes, art, humor, ideas, project management, web design, assurance quality, mentorship, you name it! We like to award achievements to people making a difference in a wide variety of domains and occasions, see it for yourself. Why not you? Make it happen, make history!
Think you are not good enough? Find support and mentors by chatting on Gitter with fellow Spacemacs users or just open an issue on GitHub, you will find help to fulfil your desire of contribution. We welcome anyone with good intentions.
In a nutshell: Be good, positive and/or with good intentions and focused on the project.

1.2. For Users

Any question related to the project is welcomed and encouraged, the worst thing that can happen is that we redirect you to the documentation.
The majority of the interactions with the community happens on GitHub via issues and on Gitter via the official Spacemacs channel. There is also an active official twitter account spacemacs.
Any opinion on the project is valorized given it is constructive.

2. Moderation

We want the community to be judged based on its moderation actions instead of telling people how to behave. The golden rules of the community are to have good intentions and stay focused on the project, for anything else that requires moderation any future user or contributor can refer to this section to know about our past moderation actions. So readers won't find any example or definition of what collaborators judge offending or outrageous, instead they will find at the end of this section a log of all major moderation actions taken by the collaborators since the beginning of the project which started officially in August 2014. It should allow you to decide whether or not you want to be part of this community. If you are not convinced then be assured that the only evil part in Spacemacs is the evil mode :-)

2.1. Guidelines

These guidelines apply to all collaborators of the project, namely @syl20bnr, @TheBB, @d12frosted and @bmag.

2.1.1. People

Collaborators cannot ban any GitHub user from the repository but they can ban users from the official Gitter channel.
A user can be banned if and only if all the collaborators agree to do so.
The reasons of the ban are mentioned in the moderation actions log (see below).

2.1.2. Issues

Issues can be locked if their contents are judged inappropriate, offending or if they deviate dangerously from the project.

2.1.3. Pull requests and Commmits

Collaborators can push to the repository without making a PR.
PR can be rejected. Rejected PR always go with a reason explicitly written when closing the PR.
Commits can be reverted if they compromise the stability of the project. The reason is contained in the commit comments.
Pull request are also issues, thus issue guidelines also apply to pull requests.

2.1.4. Messages

Only the form of a message can be edited, not its meaning, except if this meaning is outrageous.
Moderators can add information to a message to improve its accuracy without altering its meaning,
Any edition of a message is logged in the edits log located at the end of the edited message with the following format:
```
EDIT: [@moderator] action (reason: xxx)
```
The reason is added only when needed (for instance we won't add a reason for formatting edits)

2.2. Interpretation

Words used in these guidelines like good, inappropriate, offending, dangerously and outrageous are used without any explanation, their meanings and interpretations are left solely to the discretion of the collaborators who are educated persons working in the interest of the community.

2.3. Collaborators privacy

Life and actions of collaborators outside of the project (i.e. outside of the Spacemacs GitHub repository, official Spacemacs Gitter channels and Twitter official Spacemacs account timeline) are completely detached from their activities and roles in the project. They are free to express any opinion on the project or any other subjects and those opinions cannot be used to compromise their roles in the project as long as they follow the moderation guidelines with good intentions.

2.4. Maintainer

The maintainer @syl20bnr as a BDFL is free to demote a collaborator in extreme situations.
When there is no consensus on a subject, the BDFL can decide to impose his view on the subject.

2.5. Log

For transparency and future reference any major moderation actions are recorded here. As of Sunday, April 10th 2016, 7200 issues have been opened and 2 major moderation actions have been taken:

Date	Moderator	Action	Issue	Reason
2016/01/27	syl20bnr	lock	#3484	comments judged to be offending towards the Spacemacs community
2016/01/27	syl20bnr	unlock	#3484	let's make it happen, i.e. this document