Skip to main content

Code of Conduct

The Bridge Balance is a free, three-stage curriculum that people read today and will discuss together later. This page states the standard of behaviour for anyone who interacts on a Bridge Balance surface. It governs how people treat each other, and it never governs what the book teaches.

It is short on purpose. Nothing in it depends on a process that does not exist yet, and nothing in it invents a channel that nobody is watching.

What the standard is​

Everyone interacting on a Bridge Balance surface is expected to:

  • Be respectful. Argue with an idea as forcefully as you like, but aim at the idea and not the person. Read a message in the way its author intended before assuming the worst.
  • Give no ground to harassment. No insults, threats, intimidation, stalking, or unwanted sexual attention. This holds in public and in private, and it follows you to other platforms when a disagreement starts here.
  • Refuse discrimination. No slurs and no hostility aimed at anyone's race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, caste, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, disability, age, or experience level. A curriculum written for a wide range of readers has no room for it.
  • Engage honestly. Cite what you borrow and do not pass off someone else's work as your own. Do not spread claims you know to be false, and do not claim to speak for The Bridge Balance.

Respect is the idea the other three rest on. The list below is what breaking it looks like in practice.

What counts as a violation​

A violation is any behaviour that breaks the standard above. The examples below are the common ones, not an exhaustive list:

  • Mocking or belittling another person instead of answering their argument.
  • Continuing to contact someone after they have asked you to stop.
  • Sexual comments, images, or attention that were clearly unwanted.
  • Slurs, or jokes built on someone's identity, even when they are framed as humour.
  • Threatening violence, or publishing another person's private details without their consent.
  • Presenting a chapter, a prompt, a diagram, or code you did not write as your own.
  • Deliberately spreading false claims about the project, its owner, or other readers.

A blunt disagreement, an honest mistake, or a hard question about the material is not a violation. The standard is about how people behave, not about how forcefully they argue.

What this covers, and what it does not​

This applies to every Bridge Balance surface where people interact. Today that means the site and the pages on it. It will also cover the planned AI help chatbot once it is built, and any community feature the project adds later. It applies when you speak for the project elsewhere, too.

It does not cover the book's content. What a chapter says, which topics it includes, and the order the stages run in are editorial decisions that stay with the project owner. If you disagree with a chapter, make the argument; do not treat its author as the target.

Reporting, honestly​

There is no live reporting channel today. The site is a set of pages with no comments, no forum, and no signed-in accounts, so there is no moderated space and no inbox that anyone is watching. Naming a reporting address here would send you to a place that does not answer.

That will change when a live surface exists. When there is one, a real reporting path will be published on this page and announced in the changelog. Until then, this page records the standard the project holds itself to, and nothing more.

The public GitHub copy of the book is not that channel. It is a one-time snapshot taken as off-computer insurance rather than a working repository kept in sync, so it is not a route for reporting anything or for sending changes.

What happens when the standard is broken​

Once a live surface exists, the response will scale with the behaviour and the record behind it. A single harsh message is usually answered with a direct correction. Repeated harassment, a threat, or discrimination is not, and it can end in a permanent ban from every Bridge Balance surface. The project owner makes that decision and does not owe the person removed a debate about it.

Until a surface is live, this section describes a commitment rather than a process in motion. There is nothing yet for it to act on.

On this page