CHICAGO, IL—July 28, 2025. The Organization for Ethical Source (OES), the nonprofit helping technologists ensure their work is being used for social good, today announced the release of Contributor Covenant 3.0, a major rewrite of the flagship code of conduct adopted by thousands of open source communities, including Linux, Mastodon, and 9 of the 10 largest open source projects in the world.
Contributor Covenant 3.0 is designed to be more adaptable to different kinds of communities, both online and offline. It is written with clearer, less US-centric language, intended to be easier to understand and translate. The enforcement guidelines section has been reimagined as “Addressing and Repairing Harm,” reflecting an alignment with principles of restorative justice, including finding ways to safely reintegrate someone back into a community after an incident occurs. And adopters can now directly edit a template to customize their code of conduct with their own reporting and enforcement procedures, using a step-by-step builder tool on the Contributor Covenant website .
“The Contributor Covenant is an essential piece of infrastructure for building responsible, accountable communities. It is a basic building block, and I have seen it transform conflicts firsthand,” said Nathan Schneider, Professor of Media Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder and author of Governable Spaces. “This latest update is a major shift. It enables and encourages something that online communities sorely need: establishing fair processes for addressing conflict. If more communities did this, the internet would be far less vulnerable to the worst actors and bring out more of our better selves.”
Since its creation in 2014, Contributor Covenant has transformed the practice and experience of open source, helping communities establish norms and standards for how collaborators are expected to treat one another. Originally authored by Coraline Ada Ehmke, it was gifted to the Organization for Ethical Source in 2021 for community governance and stewardship.
To mark the 10th anniversary of Contributor Covenant, OES last year launched a working group of volunteers from around the world to create a major new revision that reflected the evolving needs of adopting communities, inside and outside of open source. Through surveys, conducting interviews, and gathering feedback on shared drafts, the working group engaged with over two dozen open source maintainers, community managers, code of conduct committee members, and other adopters of Contributor Covenant, learning about the challenges of code of conduct enforcement today and where existing tools were falling short—directly from practitioners.
One survey respondent wrote that a new version must make it clear that community moderators have “discretionary powers outside those outlined in the code of conduct, and are not restricted from taking other actions [in response to conflict].” Another emphasized the need for fairness in enforcement: “Setting the expectation that we will treat you well is important, as we don’t want the community to view the code of conduct as a unidirectional document.”
The volunteer working group was made up of OES members Greg Cassel, Coraline Ada Ehmke, Gerardo Lisboa, Rynn Mancuso, Mo McElaney, Maryblessing Okolie, Ben Sternthal, and Casey Watts. These collaborators operated under a consensus-based decision-making model, always striving to agree on language that preserves nuance while still being clear and meaningful to non-native English speakers.
Previous versions of Contributor Covenant have been translated by volunteers into 45 languages, and OES hopes for a new wave of translators to bring this new version of the code of conduct to more communities around the world.
Contributor Covenant 3.0 is available at https://contributor-covenant.org/
About the Organization for Ethical Source
The Organization for Ethical Source (OES) is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit representing a global, multidisciplinary community of technologists working to promote human and digital rights in the software commons. We invest in tools like Contributor Covenant as part of our commitment to strengthening the technology of community to bring about better futures for everyone. If you’d like to help us shape these futures, consider becoming an OES member or supporting us with a recurring donation. Learn about the Ethical Stack and more at https://ethicalsource.dev.