This post is an attempt to document my own personal reflections on deciding to volunteer and my experience serving on the CoC response team for UseR! 2026. Thankfully, we had no reported incidents at, or after the conference, so my reflections are much more about documenting my own learnings about the role of a CoC response team in fostering and maintaining a safe and inclusive community, and balancing a sense of service and responsibility with a healthy sense of entitlement to our own conference experience as volunteers on the team.
Hopefully, some of these reflections will help someone else overcome the hesitations and apprehensions I had when joining the CoC response team, and demystify some broader misconceptions. This post is also partly motivated by some reflections on some jokes that someone made about reporting me to the CoC team, along the lines of ‘how do you report the police to the police?’. Such jokes can feel harmless in the moment, but they work against the goals of having a CoC, and trivialize the contribution of CoC volunteers.
Before I begin, I have to thank the amazing Ella Kaye, for stepping up to lead the CoC response team, Tina Rozsos, for her sensible and measured restraint in preventing us from taking on excessive responsibilities, and Mitchell O’Hara-Wild for agreeing to join the CoC response team on short notice. It was a privilege to learn and serve the community together. I also want to acknowledge the authors of the Code of Conduct guide in the useR! knowledge base, and the resources published by Frame Shift Consulting, including the book How to Respond to Code of Conduct Reports by Valerie Aurora and Mary Gardiner.
From hesitation to joining
I think it’s safe for me to say that I have a tendency to commit first, evaluate capacity later (I’m working on it!), but even so, I hesitated when the call for CoC response team volunteers came up in the UseR! DEIA committee meetings. I had only a vague idea of what a CoC response team was. That vague idea was roughly along the lines of “enforcing rules around community conduct” – and that volunteering to lead or serve on a CoC team was basically announcing or at least sheepishly admitting “I want to police people! Give me the rule book!”.
Most people don’t want to be involved in high-stress, high emotional labor like listening to complaints of harassment or assault, and don’t want to take actions that may result in them being personally criticized or attacked. Like most emotional labor, if no one is assigned to do this work, it often falls to the more marginalized members of your community to do it without support or reward; they will then be more likely to leave under the stress. – How to Respond to Code of Conduct Reports, Valerie Aurora and Mary Gardiner
Standing up a CoC team is, like filling most volunteer service roles, often difficult. When the call for volunteers came up in a DEIA committee meeting, Tina and I both somewhat hesitantly put our hands up to be part of the team. However, neither of us had any prior CoC experience and definitely did not feel equipped to lead the CoC response team. Thankfully, Ella, who also chairs the rainbowR CoC committee, stepped up and led us through the genuinely enjoyable and enriching process of serving as the CoC team for useR! 2026. Mitchell also joined us and helped a lot with the technical infrastructure that we hadn’t given much thought to – including setting up push notifications from the reporting email inbox to Slack so no one had to be on inbox monitoring duty.
What exactly is a Code of Conduct team?
Before we talk about code of conduct response teams, what is a code of conduct? We’ve likely all seen and agreed to code of conduct terms, but what exactly is the purpose of a code of conduct?
Codes of conduct create a more inclusive and welcoming community through the following methods:
- Education: they teach people what behavior is unacceptable.
- Norm-following: most people follow group norms when they know what they are.
- Attraction/repulsion: they attract people you want and drive away people you don’t want.
- Deterrence: they create consequences for unacceptable behavior.
- Boundary setting: they keep unsafe people outside the community.
– How to Respond to Code of Conduct Reports, Valerie Aurora and Mary Gardiner
With these goals in mind, a visible CoC response team signals a commitment to upholding, as a community, a mutually agreed upon Code of Conduct. Without a CoC team, it’s almost better not having a Code of Conduct at all – aspirations without resources to support them is a recipe for disappointment at best. More likely is that it further perpetuates harm – both for victims who can find themselves on their own and without support following a CoC violation, and tacitly signals that CoC violations are tolerated, and individuals who violate the CoC can remain in the community without accountability or consequences.
A code of conduct committee is a small group of people who are responsible for enforcing the code of conduct: taking reports, investigating reports, deciding on responses, executing those responses, and informing the community about their decisions. The committee is what turns a code of conduct from a written document into meaningful action. The committee must have the full support of community leadership and have confidence they will not be overruled by leadership unless they have made a significant mistake. – How to Respond to Code of Conduct Reports, Valerie Aurora and Mary Gardiner
Aurora and Gardiner also explain that Code of Conduct teams are not:
- Rapid response teams
- Security guards
- Law enforcement
- Mediation or adjudication teams
Instead, the role of the CoC team is to establish, maintain and, if needed, action systems and procedures for handling CoC reports and violations. This includes systems for anonymous reporting, protocols and timelines for initial responses to reports, escalation and shared responsibility and joint signing for public statements, and enforcement of consequences for violations.
Deciding what we wouldn’t do
It was really quite relieving and grounding to shift from vague monitoring-based notions of what a CoC team should be responsible for, to a much more constructive and inclusive notion of service embedded in the community that agrees to a specific Code of Conduct. The CoC team is not supposed to be elevated above the rest of the community, and charged with policing bad behaviour from a place of authority. Instead, we were simply members of the community, volunteering our time and energy to maintain and enforce the Code of Conduct, and handle potential CoC issues and violations on behalf of the community.
One particularly memorable conversation in navigating the volunteer role and scope of CoC response was about whether and how we should intervene or respond if we became aware of a CoC violation happening in real time (e.g. in a talk one of us was attending). There was discussion about whether other team members should try to join as soon as possible, and even some notion of taking “shifts” to be responsible for responding in person to incidents. If any of this sounds suspiciously close to what a rapid response or intervention team would be responsible for, that’s because it is. Thankfully we all realised this and consciously decided not to take on any such responsibilities and instead allow ourselves to attend the conference first and foremost as participants.
Prevention, not policing
Code of Conduct measures are a bit like vaccinations. They are community infrastructure that is mostly invisible when it works, but is glaringly absent when things go wrong. Although Codes of Conduct and CoC response teams can’t completely prevent CoC violations, they do a lot to set the tone and reduce the likelihood of violations. To this end, much of our work as a CoC team was completed before the conference – setting up the reporting form, coordinating on who would monitor the inbox, discussing different potential situations, drafting preliminary responses and announcements in case of an incident, making sure the CoC and CoC reporting processes were adequately communicated and visible to participants.
The preventative effects of our work depend on people seeing the CoC team as a meaningful resource for navigating CoC issues, and that they can trust the volunteer team to handle reports in a transparent and accountable manner with empathy and appropriate discretion. We may have no police powers, but we do have publicly visible consequences at our disposal, such as:
- a formal warning to stop harassing behaviour
- expulsion from the conference
- removal of sponsor displays or conference posters
- cancellation or early termination of talks or other contributions to the program
These consequences only reach within the boundaries of the community itself; someone determined to cause harm elsewhere is beyond our reach. As such, it would be easy to dismiss this as a version of “security theatre” – the term security technologist Bruce Schneier used for measures (like confiscating water bottles at airport security) that make people feel safer without doing much to actually improve their safety. But unlike security theatre, these consequences don’t just create an appearance of safety: they work through the same deterrence and norm-following effects described above, making violations less likely to occur in the first place rather than merely being seen to respond after the fact.
As might be evident from above, ‘response team’ is a bit of a misnomer, since it implies we mainly deal with CoC issues after they occur. It also undersells the preventative work CoC teams do to set community expectations and reduce the likelihood of violations occurring in the first place.
Why jokes undermine CoC measures
The preventative effects and credibility of CoC measures depend on the measures and the response team being taken seriously in the first place, which is exactly what gets undermined when CoC work is treated as a joke. Joking about CoC issues, even in a nominally playful and casual social setting, works against the goals of a CoC and trivialises the contribution of CoC volunteers.
Although it felt rather small in the moment, hearing someone joke that I shouldn’t be on the CoC team because I had said or done something they didn’t like did make me reconsider (if even for a moment) whether I should have just minded my own business and not volunteered for CoC. It’s a funny thing to think about, but I would have much preferred a meaner or more direct jab at my own expense, without reference to my volunteer role on the CoC team.1
Unfortunately, if CoC reporting is treated as a joke, it’s easy for CoC issues themselves to be trivialised – individuals reporting harm get recast as “snitches” making too much of a fuss, or being too sensitive. It also makes the role a harder sell: fewer people want to volunteer for work already being laughed at.
Footnotes
It’s also worth noting that in a well-functioning CoC committee, any CoC member with a conflict of interest must recuse themselves, and additional contact points are usually provided (e.g. R Foundation Conference Committee) to address such situations.↩︎
Citation
@online{huang2026,
author = {Huang, Cynthia},
title = {Not the Police! {Reflections} from {Serving} on a {Code} of
{Conduct} {Team}},
date = {2026-07-21},
url = {https://www.cynthiahqy.com/posts/coc-team-reflections/},
langid = {en}
}