Hello Virtual AC, this is Tzviya Siegman with Wiley.

I'm here today to talk about the Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct.

You've heard me talk about this many times before and we are just about finished with this iteration of the revised CEPC.

If you take a look at slide number 2, I mention that this has now been approved by the Positive Work Environment Community Group, the W3M, AB and AC.

Taking a look at slide 3, we'll talk about what it is that we've changed in this iteration of CEPC.

We've removed phrases that begin with the word 'never' and replaced them with the detailed list of unacceptable behaviors.

This code attempts to help people understand when they may be offending another member or another participant in a group.

Why was this important?

There were a lot of phrases in the previous version of the CEPC, the 2014 version, that were somewhat vague or perhaps a little bit too specific. This allowed for a little bit of confusion or maybe too much wiggle room in what was and was not allowed.

Likewise, we've shifted many of the instructive sections in the 2014 version of CEPC into a longer section of expected behaviors with some explanation about what these behaviors mean.

It wasn't always very clear to people what something like 'never bully' or 'never harass' meant and we've tried to make this more instructive.

Respect is something that we all value, saying that it's important to respect one another is great. Giving a little bit more of information about what it means to respect one another, we hope will be more helpful to everybody using this CEPC.

We've added a section about reporting violations as well as supporting the code. We hope that this will be valuable to people who both have to report violations.

What it means to report a violation, who it is that this will be reported to and what it means to those who are responsible for reporting the code, ombudspeople, chairs, people in either official leadership positions, or what we might call lay leadership positions.

Importantly, we've added something called “if you've done something improper.” So that it's clear to people who violated the CEPC how they can move forward.

Sometimes violations are minor, sometimes they're less minor.

If somebody does something that is insensitive, this is a small section that explains in detail how one can apologize and move forward.

Moving on to slide four, let's talk about what's next for the Positive Work Environment Community Group.

We're going to begin with training sessions.

We have not yet outlined a full robust training outline, but we are going to begin with a course by Jory Burson of Bocoup about conflict deescalation.

Almost every Working Group, Community Group, any group, has some amount of conflict and it's important for us to understand what we can do to remove that conflict or at least change the direction of that conflict, so that we can work together in a more comfortable way.

This is the beginning of a training session and it's certainly not the be all end all of what it is that we're trying to accomplish with this CEPC.

There are many, many situations that go beyond basic conflict and we can't just change things with a quick one or two hour session about how to deescalate conflict but this is certainly a good place to start.

A much larger program of reviewing and overhauling the existing Ombudsperson Program, the W3C has several ombudspeople and we've become aware that our program is somewhat lacking according to current Ombudsperson guidelines.

There are other programs that are similar to Ombudspeople that we've begun reviewing and we're going to be looking for a best way forward.

This is going to be a long process and we need to be working with people who are familiar with the legalities as well as Human Resources best practices.

And we will be revising the procedures document that is associated with CEPC which is what happens when there is a violation and how it is that we move forward with that.

That goes hand in hand with the revision of the Ombuds Program.

If you're interested in working on any of these projects, please contact PWECG.

Join us.

Please contact me if you have any questions, please feel free to discuss the revision of the CEPC in the discussion time for this AC meeting and I look forward to hearing from you.

Thanks so much.