A Bot-based Approach to Manage Codes of Conduct in Open-Source Projects
Sergio Cobos, Javier Luis Cánovas Izquierdo
TL;DR
This work develops a bot-based framework to manage codes of conduct in OSS, anchored on the Contributor Covenant, by analyzing, monitoring, and enforcing ethical guidelines through a coordinated set of GitHub Action bots and server-side services. It provides empirical insight into CoC presence and Covenant alignment, defines a pragmatic set of ethical flags, and demonstrates automated governance workflows including updating, adding, and enhancing CoCs as well as moderating contributions. The approach achieves high automated capability with LLM-assisted analysis while acknowledging limitations in precision and the need for human oversight, scalability, and multilingual support. The framework aims to improve inclusivity and governance in OSS by enabling proactive, transparent, and scalable CoC management across projects.
Abstract
The development of Open-Source Software (OSS) projects relies on the collaborative work of contributors, generally scattered around the world. To enable this collaboration, OSS projects are hosted on social-coding platforms like GitHub, which provide the infrastructure to host the code as well as the support for enabling the participation of the community. The potentially rich and diverse mixture of contributors in OSS projects makes their management not only a technical challenge, where automation tools and bots are usually deployed, but also a social one. To this aim, OSS projects have been increasingly deploying a declaration of their code of conduct, which defines rules to ensure a respectful and inclusive participatory environment in the community, being the Contributor Covenant the main model to follow. However, the broad adoption and enforcement of codes of conduct in OSS projects is still limited. In particular, the definition, deployment, and enforcement of codes of conduct is a very challenging task. In this paper, we propose an approach to effectively manage codes of conduct in OSS projects based on the Contributor Covenant proposal. Our solution has been implemented as a bot-based solution where bots help in the definition of codes of conduct, the monitoring of OSS projects, and the enforcement of ethical rules.