I'm +1 to having a CoC. It doesn't have to be complicated, and indeed CoCs are better when they're uncomplicated (but explicit! vague CoCs help noone). The point of a CoC is not to change people's behavior (if you want that, there are more effective approaches). The point is to serve as a touchstone for community values. Without a touchstone, communities drift over time as people age and come and go. Drifting itself is unavoidable and not necessarily bad, but sometimes that drifting is the slipping that becomes corrosive. Touchstones give communities a way to correct for corrosion: by concretely recording the past they make the past visible, and thus make the present visible as something that has changed from the past. CoCs also, as Tom says, make the community values explicit for outsiders to see. This is especially important for women and minorities, because we are disproportionately affected by breaches of civility. This is why numerous organizations for women in STEM advocate for having CoCs. To pick a few examples: https://www.ashedryden.com/blog/codes-of-conduct-101-faq https://adainitiative.org/2014/02/18/ https://geekfeminism.org/2014/06/30/ The mere existence of a CoC indicates that at least at some point the community cared enough about civility to try to ensure it. That alone indicates that the community has higher standards for civility than the vast bulk of online communities for programming. And it is something we look for. If you want to avoid discouraging women and minorities from joining, it's not enough to play Simon Says, you have to write the rules down too. -- Live well, ~wren