We aim to empower everyone to thrive through a comprehensive range of online resources. From codes of conduct that foster a respectful community to educational tools that guide our workplace initiatives, our virtual resources are designed to support your success and contribute to a welcoming and supportive workplace.

Codes of Conduct

Participant Code of Conduct

UCAR is committed to providing a safe, productive, and welcoming environment for all participants in any conference, workshop, field project or project hosted or managed by UCAR, NSF NCAR, and UCP, no matter what role they play or their background. This includes respectful treatment of everyone regardless of gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, age, body size, race, religion, national origin, ethnicity, level of experience, political affiliation, veteran status, pregnancy, genetic information, as well as any other characteristic protected under state or federal law.

All participants (and guests) are required to abide by this Code of Conduct. This Code of Conduct applies to all UCAR-related events, including those sponsored by organizations other than UCAR but held in conjunction with UCAR events, in any location throughout the world. You can find UCAR’s participant code of conduct here.

For more details, please refer to the full UCAR Participant Code of Conduct.

Contributor Code of Conduct

For contributors to software projects. This Code of Conduct applies to all spaces managed by the Project whether they be physical, online or face-to-face. This includes project code, code repository, associated web pages, documentation, mailing lists, project websites and wiki pages, issue tracker, meetings, telecons, events, project social media accounts, and any other forums created by the project team which the community uses for communication. In addition, violations of this Code of Conduct outside these spaces may affect a person's ability to participate within them. Representation of a project may be further defined and clarified by project maintainers.

For more details, please refer to the full UCAR Contributor Code of Conduct.

Resources for Intervention and Discussion Facilitation

5 Ds for Bystander Intervention

People often avoid interrupting a troubling situation due to not knowing what ‘to do’ at the moment. In this resource, participants are introduced to five different strategies that turn people from a bystander to an upstander. View the 5 Ds of Bystander Intervention.

Useful Tools for Discussions:

Oops, ouch
Part of having difficult conversations about topics on which we may disagree or hold differing perspectives is the possibility of unintentionally saying something that may be hurtful to others. If you do say something that is hurtful and you realize it, you can say "oops" to acknowledge it and then try again. Alternatively, if someone else said something hurtful then you can say "ouch," which lets everyone know that there's something that needs to be discussed further. The specific words “oops” and “ouch” aren’t necessarily used all that often, but the idea gives people a way to bring these things up. See more below on how to effectively raise an issue and how to apologize properly.

Everybody's right, but only partially
The goal is not to agree, but to gain deeper understanding. Remember that your experiences of how the world works and how society treats you are not the same as anyone else’s.

Use "both/and," rather than "either/or," thinking
Someone else may be making a good point that you may miss if you’re concentrating on disagreeing with part of it. Agree with the parts you agree with, and disagree with the parts you don’t. Remember that sometimes you might both be right.

Intent ≠ impact
When you say something unintentionally hurtful, it still hurts whether or not you meant it to. As an analogy — if you tread on someone’s foot and they tell you it hurt, you apologize and step off. You don’t spend time explaining that you didn’t mean to step on them, and so therefore, they shouldn’t be hurt.

Be aware of multiple identities
People have multiple identities, such as their race, gender, sexual orientation, veteran status, disability status, where they grew up, the languages they speak, and many more. As such, each of us will have had life experiences that reflect all of those identities, and a woman who grew up in the deep south may have very different views from one who grew up in New York City.  We always need to bear in mind that all of our identities can affect our viewpoints, and not make assumptions about people’s beliefs and experiences based on only one of their identities.

Disagree with content, not tone
Some of the topics we will be talking about are emotional issues for people who live these experiences every day. While some people in the room are able to talk about these things in a detached way, others are not, and should not be expected to. Disagreement with people’s points is fine, but be sure to disagree with the content of what people are saying, not the way in which they’re saying it, and take care not to invalidate their own personal experiences.

How to effectively call someone out/in
As we mentioned above, part of having difficult conversations about topics on which we may disagree or hold differing perspectives is the possibility of unintentionally saying something that may be hurtful to others. When someone does say something unintentionally hurtful, we need to have a way to talk to them about it effectively. Often we talk about “calling out” someone who has said something hurtful or had an “oops” moment. It can be preferable to talk about “calling in,” which assumes that everyone wants to do the right thing, just needs a bit of help understanding what happened. Always remember that calling someone in is a brave thing to do because it’s risky. People often don’t react well to being called in (see below, under “how to apologize”), and so it puts the person doing it at risk of personal attack. This blog post is a great primer. We can also mitigate some of the bad feelings by ensuring that we call in people’s words, rather than their intent.

How to apologize properly
Getting called out/in can be uncomfortable. It can be embarrassing and feel like a personal attack. The first reaction most people have is to defend themselves. This is usually the least helpful response. Remember that being called in is a gift from a very brave person, who was willing to put their own safety and comfort on the line to help you realize that you made a mistake. The following two posts are superb explanations of how you can react in a good way to being called in: I was wrong and I am sorry and How to apologize.

Educational Resources

Book Kits For A More Connected Scientific Community

Inspire a more collaborative and supportive scientific community through knowledge dissemination, shared learning experiences, and meaningful discussions with peers. Miss reading an entire book? Try NSF NCAR Library’s book club kits in a bag. Low on time? Try the one-hour book club or browse the selected materials in the resource lists for independent learning.

For more information, please visit the NSF NCAR Library Book Club Kits page.

Resources for Practical Implementation

Inclusive Scientific Meetings: An Implementation Guide

Science meetings are an important place to focus efforts to create more welcoming spaces because they are the backbone of science and key to the development of a successful scientific career. As such, this guide was developed to be a companion document to the organization 500 Women Scientists’ Inclusive Scientific Meetings Guide in order to provide more concrete examples of how to put their suggestions into practice.

This document was developed with those who are new to these concepts in mind, with the goal of making the implementation of the original guide’s suggestions easier for meeting organizers. 

This guide is not meant to be a replacement of the original 500 Women Scientists’ Inclusive Scientific Meetings guide, rather it is meant as a complement to it.