This team agreement governs the environment and interactions of the Colorado Digital Service team. This applies not just in how we collaborate as an internal team, but how we view our engagements with all government partners. We created it because we believe that articulating our values and obligations to one another reinforces the already exceptional level of respect among the team and because having a code provides us with clear avenues to correct our culture should it ever stray from that course.
We make this agreement public in the hopes of contributing to the ongoing conversation about inclusion in the tech, design, civic and media communities and encourage other teams to take it and make it their own. To our team, we commit to enforce and evolve this agreement as our team grows.
(This introduction is shamelessly adapted from the Vox Code of Conduct.)
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We confront problems, not people.
Our key focus is to improve the way digital government services are provided to all members of the Colorado community. In an effort to effectively achieve this mission, we choose to fight systems and challenge premises. More importantly, we do this so that others can feel the ability to do the same safely. -
We seek out and amplify opportunities to engage with diverse perspectives.
We recognize that there is a responsibility in the work we do to bring in perspectives that are dissimilar to our own and representative of the communities we serve. To do this, we actively find ways to infuse equity, inclusion, and belonging in our team, engagements, and the way we communicate publicly. Furthermore, we encourage our partners, both internal and external, to share feedback with us in hopes of making us better partners. -
We listen first and aim to raise up the voices of our teammates, all our partners, and our differences in expertise.
We actively work to invite all voices to join the conversation and acknowledge that good ideas can come from anyone. We recognize that while everyone is an expert in their own experience, we can’t assume we are experts in the experiences of others. We work to ensure that we are not the loudest voices in the room and focus to empower and elevate our government partner’s ideas. -
We are not here to judge.
Governmental systems have been trying to support the collective care of the public for decades. In this, we recognize that there may be circumstances where previous implementations of a service were not ideal. It is not our place to place judgement on how a service came to be, instead our focus is on how to improve these services to the best of our ability.
Team members are responsible for clarifying and enforcing our agreements of acceptable behavior and will raise any issues observed in response to any behavior that they deem inappropriate, threatening, offensive, or harmful.
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We are accountable to one another and embrace the discomfort of growth.
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We will hold ourselves responsible to practice bystander intervention practices and actively engage in confronting microaggressions.
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As we work with agencies, we actively work on creating an inclusive environment and create opportunities to share bi-directional feedback.
If you have questions or suggestions, reach out to the Colorado Digital Service.
Interested in following along with the work of the Colorado Digital Service? Submit an interest form to stay connected. You can also check out our work at our Colorado Digital Service website, GitHub, Linkedin, or Twitter