Code of conducts are useful in fostering the type of communities different organizations desire.

For example, the Go Project has a code of conduct based on the Contributor Covenant Code of Conduct. Relatively terse, the document’s main points are community participants to be positive and engaging in interactions and to be inclusive as a community. While Go’s code of conduct is similar to its predecessor in its broad strokes, Go’s code of conduct makes additions like providing context for why a code of conduct is needed and summarizing the salient points at the end. These additions make the document more approachable, and in a project as large as Go, this is important in order to minimize bad behavior from participants spanning different cultures.

Another example of a large project’s code of conduct is Eclipse’s. Also based on the Contributor Covenant, it makes slightly different deviations. Eclipse’s Code of Conduct retains the formal tone and drills down on enforcement. As far as I could tell, Eclipse has not had any scandal justifying why it so heavily reinforces adhering to the code of conduct, but it may be because the Eclipse Foundation is entirely distributed. Unlike Go which is primarily backed by a large corporation (Google), the Eclipse Foundation is entirely funded by the community. As such, it has to be more defensive in order to retain a positive culture and keep the foundation alive.

In a different direction, the Sugar Labs Code of Conduct is based on the Ubuntu code of conduct. Again, similar in its broad strokes to other code of conducts, it differs from Go’s by focusing on collaboration, with a section explaining the plurality of the “Labs” in “Sugar Labs” is because it encompasses a whole community. Additionally it highlights maintaining family-friendly language, supporting Sugar Labs’ mission of helping students.

While all the code of conducts so far have been limited to online interactions, the Python Code of Conduct is an example that extends rules and expected behaviors to in-person events. As such, it lists examples of physical behaviors not allowed like bringing weapons, stalking, and inappropriate contact.

Past a certain scale, code of conducts are almost necessary to maintain a consistent culture. While they’re typically quite similar across different organizations, you should double check before participating in a community.