The N-Body Shop collaboration strives to provide an inclusive and safe environment for all of its members. We welcome the inclusion of people with diverse skills, backgrounds, experiences, and opinions and recognize that such diversity is critical to the realization of our scientific endeavors. It is our priority that all group members are heard and feel confident in freely expressing their opinions. We also recognize the important value of mentorship and the obligation of our more senior members to actively support the scientific and career aspirations of our younger members. To encourage the cultivation of such an inclusive and productive environment, we have formulated the following code of conduct to which all members of the collaboration are expected to adhere. Resources and guidelines for further cultivating this environment is included in our Best Practices document. When applicable, N-body Shop members will adhere to these guidelines when interacting with the community outside of our collaboration. This includes, but is not limited to, interactions at conferences, academic talks/seminars/colloquia, and public outreach events.

1. We treat all people with respect, regardless of race, gender identity, sex, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, nationality, ethnicity, immigration status, age, or religion. This collaboration will be a bullying- and harassment-free environment.

   Harassment of any kind is not tolerated. This includes sustained disruption of talks or other events, inappropriate physical contact, sexual attention or innuendo, deliberate intimidation, stalking, and photography or recording of an individual without consent. It also includes offensive comments related to gender, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race or religion, or any other exclusionary comments or jokes.

2. When transgressions occur, we will provide critical feedback to others in a way that is constructive and respectful. Likewise we will be open to critical feedback, including and especially from those less senior than us. This includes both feedback on science and/or code development, as well as feedback on behavior and/or mentorship.


3. Faculty/PIs will make attendance to conferences that emphasize Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) and their scientific identities (e.g. SACNAS and NSBP in the USA) a central priority with the overt goal of reinforcing/establishing pipelines to further the representation of BIPOC at their host institutions, as well as within our collaboration and the astronomy/astrophysics community as a whole.


4. Faculty/PIs or any other collaboration member that supervises students shall be clear about what financial support they can provide their advisees. This includes, but may not be limited to, travel funding and salary. Travel funding for students, particularly to present their work, will be highly prioritized by Faculty/PIs and included in their grant proposals where allowable.


5. Advisors and/or mentors will maintain constructive, supportive, and timely lines of communication with their advisees, ensuring that the advisees are aware of the status of their work. Issues in the working relationship between advisers and advisees will be addressed by the advisor in a timely fashion (see best practices document for further guidelines). Advisors will be open to critique from their students/mentees and strive to outwardly demonstrate this vulnerability. Advisors shall support their advisees in academic and departmental matters, acting as their confidant.


6. Research group meetings, as well as meetings involving the entire collaboration, will be places where we respect and acknowledge each other's humanity. This acknowledgement includes (but is not limited to) providing a safe space for group members to discuss topics not directly related to the group/collaboration's research goals. This also includes discussions related to the culture of the group/collaboration.


7. We will respect the scientific work of others, both within the collaboration and without, through written acknowledgement and/or appropriate citations within papers. We will accept requests by original authors for such appropriate acknowledgment. When utilizing code written by active group members, they will be consulted with prior to publication and offered appropriate authorship on the paper. In the case of non-active group members, each member will be consulted as to what role they would like in future publications, and we will adhere to their wishes.


8. Code development by collaboration members which is performed on separate git branches/forks will be treated as proprietary. Such code will not be made public in any way nor used by any group member without the explicit consent of the code author, or any proxy which they have explicitly assigned to act on their behalf. Code that is merged with the main branch of private N-Body Shop github repositories will be assumed to be openly accessible to the members of the collaboration. Only when code is merged with the main branch of the public repositories will it be considered open for public use. All code development should be done with the goal of eventually merging first with the private main branch, and then with the public branch of the repository in question.


9. We care about cultivating an inclusive culture beyond our collaboration and encouraging the wider community to adopt better practices. To this end, we will publicly call out conferences which either do not have codes of conduct, or fail to adhere to and/or adequately enforce them. Furthermore, when not harmful to the academic trajectory of the participant, we encourage the boycott of any conference which does not have a code of conduct explicitly rejecting harassment and bullying of all forms. When attending conferences, senior members in particular will call out behavior which is inappropriate/against that event's code of conduct through the appropriate channels.

It is crucial that this code of conduct is enforced by members, particularly more senior members, in the N-body Shop collaboration. To this end we have comprised the following resources and guidelines for those that witness - or are actively harmed by - behavior that is inconsistent with this code of conduct. We note that much of the points outlined in the code of conduct above can and should apply outside of our collaboration and we will strive to work to instill these values in our wider academic community.

1. A rotating committee of collaboration members -- consisting of 2 graduate students, 2 postdocs, and 2 faculty members -- will be responsible for addressing violations of the code of conduct. Committee members are expected to recuse themselves from incidents in which they perceive a conflict of interest. The reporting individual(s) can also ask for certain committee members to be excused from addressing their specific incident and this will be done. When committee members are excused from handling an incident, another collaboration member of similar seniority, when possible, should take their place.


2. Any N-body Shop member that witnesses events of bullying, harassment, or any form of aggression toward anyone should first approach the affected person to show support and check on their wellbeing. The witness may suggest the affected person report the behavior (see below) or offer to do so on their behalf. The affected person alone should determine what actions they feel comfortable taking, or which are taken on their behalf, related to this event. Affected/witness parties should consider reaching out for outside help when either or both do not feel equipped to handle the situation. One major resource for this will be a rotating committee of collaboration members dedicated to helping with these situations.


3. Collaboration members shall be open to criticism on their behavior. With this in mind, it is encouraged that those directly affected by - or witnesses to (with appropriate permission; see above) - any violation of the code of conduct first attempt to address the offense with the offender directly.


4. We will strive to mitigate the risks involved in the reporting of incidents in violation of our code of conduct. An anonymous reporting system will be made available to collaboration members. The system will send reports to a rotating committee of collaboration members (see below). The option will be given to report to a subset of this committee, though by default the entire committee will receive all reports of code of conduct violations.


5. Retribution of any form against anyone reporting a code of conduct violation will be seen as a malicious act and handled accordingly (see below for consequences).

Consequences for violating the code of conduct.

1. We recognize that each collaboration member's host institution will have their own requirements for mandatory reporting and procedures for investigation and punishment. Such processes may also have requirements that such matters not be discussed openly. As a collaboration, we will respect and defer to these guidelines when applicable.


2. The rotating committee will be tasked with determining the appropriate course of action for each reported violation of the code of conduct. Throughout this process, the affected individual(s), if their identity is known, will be consulted to ensure that any action taken on their behalf, and against the other party, is consistent with their wishes and does not jeopardize their career prospects, their physical and/or emotional well being.


3. For first offenses, if it is determined that a reasonable observer would recognize the problematic behavior in question as the result of ignorance and/or misunderstanding and not malice, then the committee will approach the person in question to discuss the situation. In this case it will be assumed that the person in question is open to opportunities for behavioral growth through constructive feedback. The committee will approach this person with both respect and honesty about their actions and their consequences. These conversations will be expected to remain private and will not be publicly known to other collaboration members beyond the offending individual(s), the affected individual(s), and the committee members.


4. For more serious offenses (including repeated "minor" offenses previously addressed with feedback) where a reasonable observer would recognize that an action was done with malicious intent against the affected individual(s), the committee will determine the appropriate course of action. Such situations include repeated actions that would, in isolation, be seen as non-malicious, and have been addressed with the process of #3. Possible courses of action will vary depending on the exact situation and severity of the infraction. These may include:


• A formal condemnation and warning
• Formal reporting to the home institution of the offending individual
• Temporary or permanent expulsion from collaboration-sponsored events and meetings
• Temporary or permanent revocation of permission to use specific proprietary data and/or code
• Temporary or permanent expulsion from the collaboration entirely


5. For all incidents, the person accused of behavior inconsistent with our collaboration's values will be allowed to share their perspective with the committee members handling their situation. This will be done before any course of action has been decided.
6. When sanctions are imparted on the offending individual(s), it is left up to the discretion of the rotating committee and the affected individual(s) as to whether the sanctions and the reasons for them are made public to the rest of the collaboration.