In late December 2022 and January 2023, the CppCon Code of Conduct (CoC) team and the Standard C++ Foundation board learned of serious allegations against a member of the CppCon organization. The CoC team and Foundation take all allegations seriously and prioritize the physical and psychological safety of our attendees. The accused person agreed to voluntarily recuse themselves from CppCon matters pending investigation. Because the members of the CoC team and of the Foundation board all have personal or professional relationships with the accused, they recused themselves from participating in an investigation into the allegations. CppCon hired an independent attorney investigator with over 26 years’ experience to perform an impartial and thorough investigation of the allegations, with no constraints on whom to interview or directions to pursue. That investigation took three months and produced a 62-page report which concluded that “a preponderance of the evidence did not support the allegations against [the accused].” Because the report gave no basis to continue to restrict or take action against the accused, the CoC team members and the Foundation board members unanimously agreed that the accused should have all restrictions removed.

The CoC team and Foundation will consider sharing additional details regarding this matter confidentially with other conference and organization Code of Conduct teams on a case by case basis as needs may arise. Such teams can request additional information by contacting admin@isocpp.org.

The following summary is intended to help the community understand what kind of Code of Conduct (CoC) incidents we received reports about in the year since previous conference, and how the CppCon CoC team and organisers responded.

Overview

Again at CppCon 2022, staff and volunteers participated in CoC training prior to the conference.

The Code of Conduct team for CppCon 2022 was led by Guy Davidson and consisted of Sy Brand, Inbal Levi and Gabriel Dos Reis. Inbal and Gabriel were on-site, while Guy and Sy were off-site, in the UTC+1 time zone. (CppCon 2022 was a hybrid conference, with on-site and on-line talks and participants.)

The code of conduct for CppCon 2022 was as published here, using the August 10th 2022 commit.

Summary of reports at CppCon

At CppCon 2022, one incident was brought to the attention of the CoC team:

(1) An organiser was concerned that a speaker’s talk slides promoted favouring one side in an active war. There was no formal CoC report, but both the organiser and speaker notified the CoC team of the concern.

• Within 48 hours the CoC team replied that the specific statement violated no provision of the Code of Conduct. In future, the CoC team, conference organisers, and Foundation directors will consider whether to provide any suggestions or policy for speakers about non-technical content on slides.

Other reports regarding past/other conferences

Around the same time as this year’s conference, there were also one report regarding a past CppCon conference, and two reports regarding non-CppCon conferences:

(2) A past speaker complained that at a previous CppCon conference an organiser had approached others, including women, in a way they felt was sexually suggestive and that discriminated against non-speaker men.

• The CoC team had witnessed several occasions of the interaction being complained about, and decided that whether it was suggestive or discriminatory was a matter of opinion. However, the organiser was informed of this complaint so that they could be aware of the additional perspective.

(3) A past speaker complained about the conduct of a CppCon organiser at another non-CppCon conference.

• Even though the complaint was about events outside CppCon and so not under the CppCon CoC, because it could call into question a CppCon organiser’s judgment, the CppCon CoC team and (different) CppCon organisers reached out to the CoC team of the other conference. The other conference said they had investigated the same complaint regarding their conference and had decided to take no action.

(4) A past speaker complained about the aggressive conduct of a member of the community at another non-CppCon conference.

• In our investigation, the CppCon CoC team reached out to the CoC team of the other conference. They were able to confirm the incident. We noted their response; since the behaviour took place outside of CppCon, there is no action to answer here. However, we have recorded the reports and decided to monitor the behaviour of this community member at CppCon in the future.

Restriction enforcement

Finally, before CppCon 2022 an incident arose that was not a CoC report but was enforcing a preexisting restriction:

(5) After the call for submissions for CppCon 2022, a person who is restricted and not permitted to work in the conference nevertheless responded to a prospective speaker who inquired for help with their talk submission.

• The organisers realised that they had overlooked removing the restricted person from the speaker help request email list. The organisers removed the restricted person from that list; they checked all the email lists again to ensure the restricted person was removed from all of them; they reminded the restricted person that the restricted person was not allowed to participate any conference roles; they informed the prospective speaker that the restricted person did not represent the conference and arranged for someone actually from the conference to assist the speaker; and they informed the CoC team about this enforcement of the existing restrictions.