The Ethical Stack

The fundamental premise of our work is that promoting just and equitable outcomes in tech starts "at home", inside our open source communities, and radiates outward: to collaborators, adopters, users, all the way down to the people who are directly or indirectly impacted by the technologies we bring into the world.

This is the philosophy behind the Ethical Stack.

A three-column diagram titled The Ethical Stack. The three columns are labeled Phase, Tool, and Purpose and each row reads reads horizontally. For the ideate phase, the tool is the Ethical Tech Pre-flight Checklist, with a purpose of ethical norms for inventors. The co-create phase has Contributor Covenant providing ethical norms for collaborators. The release phase uses the Hippocratic License to enforce ethical norms for adopters. In the evolution phase, there is the Open Social Compact providing ethical norms for governance. Finally, for the impact phase, the Priority of Constituencies provides ethical norms for public good.

The Ethical Stack is a layered approach to centering ethics in open source. By combining layers, open source communities can adopt the tools that best suit their needs and reflect their shared values-- tools that meet them where they are.

How We Work

We are proud of our innovative way of working:

We center the Ethical Source Principles in all of the work we do.

Our shared values guide all aspects of our work.

What We Believe