Every student should feel safe and welcome to contribute in this course. As the instructor, I will try to establish this tone whenever possible, but ultimately the responsibility for cultivating a safe and welcoming community belongs to the students—that means you!

Fortunately, being part of a safe and welcoming community is not too hard. A good place to start is to recognize (and continually remind yourself) of the following facts:

• Your classmates come from a variety of cultural, economic, and educational backgrounds. Something that is obvious to you may not be obvious to them.
• Your classmates are here to learn. They have the right to pursue their education without being distracted by others’ disruptive behavior, or made uncomfortable by inappropriate jokes or unwanted sexual interest.

If each of us remembers these facts and act with corresponding decency, respect, and professionalism, the course will certainly be better for everyone.

Zooming out: diversity and computer science

On a broader note, computer science suffers from a lack of diversity. Part of this complicated problem is that underrepresented groups leave computer science programs at a higher rate, and evidence shows that this is a result of environmental conditions. I hope that our efforts in this course can help to improve this situation, in some small way, rather than make it worse.

Many open source projects and professional societies have recognized that the lack of diversity amongst contributors is a problem since they miss out on ideas, perspectives, and contributions from underrepresented groups. To address this, they have established community guidelines and codes of conduct to support communities that are more welcoming to new and diverse contributors. Here are a few examples that I recommend reading:

• Contributor Covenant: a code of conduct shared by many open source projects, including Atom, Eclipse, Mono, Rails, Swift, and many more.
• Mozilla Community Participation Guidelines
• Python Diversity Statement
• Ubuntu Code of Conduct
• ACM Code of Conduct

Note that promoting diversity is also a core value of Oregon State University and a goal of the College of Engineering

What to do about harassment

If you are the victim of harassment in this class, there are several resources available to you:

• You may schedule a private meeting to talk to the instructor.
• You may contact the University Ombuds Office for confidential guidance and advice.
• You may contact the Office of Equal Opportunity and Access to file an informal or formal complaint.