Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

We value you.

The mission of WPCampus is to advance and support higher education. We believe the growth of education and research are most powerful when its voices are diverse.

WPCampus welcomes people of any race, color, national or ethnic origin, sex, age, size, physical ability, neurodiversity, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or religion.

We welcome people who want to change the world, people who want to be involved, people who want to learn something new, and people who want to share their experiences with a community.

We welcome you no matter if you’ve used WordPress since the beginning or if you just heard about it yesterday. We value empathy more than code quality. We believe accessibility is a priority, not an afterthought. We think neurodiversity is something to be proud of.

We believe in being inclusive, welcoming, and supportive of anyone who comes to us in good faith with the desire to build a community. Sometimes we need to step out of our comfort zones to make everyone feel welcome. We recognize that privilege is real and that the privileged have more bandwidth to be uncomfortable and help make our space more welcoming.

We have enough experience to know that we won’t get any of this perfect on the first try. We also have enough hope, energy, and idealism to learn. We may not be able to satisfy everyone, but we will work to avoid harming anyone. And we promise that if we get it wrong, we’ll listen carefully and respectfully to you when you point it out to us, and we’ll do our best to make good on our mistakes.

We value diversity and strive for inclusion because it makes the community stronger and more effective. We believe diverse teams make better things. We strive to make everyone feel welcome and know that their contribution is important.

Our principles

We encourage all members, especially contributors and leaders, to embrace the following principles intended to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion in our community.

Mutual respect

Within the parameters of our core values and Code of Conduct, we are committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion. Our members fundamentally value and respect experiences that are different from their own.

Accessibility

We are committed to ensuring equal access to all experiences, content, and functionality, whether online or offline. Our community is only truly inclusive when everything is accessible.

Freedom and flexibility

We value that each member of our community comes from their own unique organization or institution and recognize the diverse requirements and practices of each group.

Knowledge and creativity

By increasing diversity, equality, and inclusion, we believe we will access more expansive and varied ideas, information, and perspectives, making us more creative, informed community members.

Transparency

We believe we have a responsibility to society generally, and our community specifically, to achieve our goals with honesty and transparency, regularly reporting progress and lessons learned along the way.

Peer support

We want to prioritize building peer networks, both formal and informal, to help individuals, their institutions, and the larger field achieve greater diversity.

Public leadership and support

These principles are a priority to the leaders in our community. We believe we can encourage others by exercising visible leadership and support of these principles. We will publicly promote the benefits of diversity, learn from those within and outside our organization, and identify new paths that lead to equitable growth.

How to report feedback or issues

Our desire for this statement is to be a living document that grows with our community; never perfect but always striving to improve. We welcome any and all feedback about our statement. Please submit your thoughts using our contact form or feel free to start a discussion in our Slack workspace.

If you’d like to share your thoughts “in person”, we encourage you to join our monthly Board meetings.

If you feel that someone is not following these principles and, by extension, our Code of Conduct, we ask that you notify us via our Code of Conduct reporting form. Likewise, if you feel that any of our leaders, or the community in general, is not upholding the standards outlined in this document we encourage you to communicate that via the Code of Conduct form, our general contact form, and/or in conversation in Slack, whether public or private.

Attribution and license

This statement is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.

It’s language was inspired by several others, including:

Last modified: May 16, 2019 by Rachel Cherry