Rachel Tropea is Senior Reseach Archivist and Jaye Weatherburn is Digital Preservation Officer at the University of Melbourne
Australasia Preserves is an active digital preservation community of practice for the Australasian region, established in February 2018 (http://blogs.unimelb.edu.au/digital-preservation-project/2018/03/06/australasia-preserves-establishing-a-digital-preservation-community-of-practice/). This community aims to nurture a community of learners, teachers, researchers, managers, and practitioners from a variety of professional and personal backgrounds and skill levels.
A team from the University of Melbourne has committed time and resources during 2018 for organising online monthly meetups, featuring a variety of speakers and topics. The Twitter hashtag #AusPreserves is used to share information with the broader international digital preservation community.
Because this community is diverse and growing, we wanted to ensure that everyone feels welcome to join, to participate, and to contribute to the Australasia Preserves community of practice. To create a safe and welcoming environment, we decided to draft a code of conduct to share with the community.
To develop the draft, we did a literature review and gathered our favourite articles and codes of conduct. Thanks to the CC-zero licence of groups such as the Recurse Centre, ausglam.space, and GeekFeminism, we were able to use and adapt their words to suit our environment and culture. We’ve shared a list of useful resources we consulted at the end of this blog post.
We shared the draft code of conduct (http://blogs.unimelb.edu.au/digital-preservation-project/2018/11/07/developing-a-community-code-of-conduct-for-australasia-preserves/) with the Australasia Preserves community on 7 November 2018, and invited comments and contributions. Collaborative development of the code of conduct is ongoing.
Resources
Geek Feminism: http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Conference_anti-harassment/Policy
Open Knowledge Foundation Australia: http://au.okfn.org/code-of-conduct/
ausglam.space: https://ausglam.space/about/more
newcardigan: https://newcardigan.org/code-of-conduct-anti-harassment-policy/
Django: https://www.djangoproject.com/conduct/
Python Mentors: http://web.archive.org/web/20141015054646/http://pythonmentors.com/
Fedora: http://web.archive.org/web/20141031235644/http://fedoraproject.org:80/code-of-conduct
Do Better at Conference Diversity: http://conference.hopper.org.nz/
Recurse Social Rules: https://www.recurse.com/code-of-conduct
A Code of Conduct is not enough: https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/a-code-of-conduct-is-not-enough
The ethics of working in digital preservation: https://www.dpoc.ac.uk/2018/04/05/ethics-of-digital-preservation/
DPC Inclusion and Diversity Policy: https://dpconline.org/docs/miscellaneous/about/1807-dpc-inclusion-and-diversity-policy/file
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