Code of conduct
The Society exists so that people working on sustainable energy technologies can find one another, argue productively, and get better at what they do. That only works if everyone taking part can expect to be treated decently. This code says what the Society expects, and what happens when it is not met. It applies to conferences and workshops, to Special Interest Groups, to anything submitted or published through the Society, and to correspondence between members conducted through the Society's own channels.
What is expected
Judge the work, not the person. Robust disagreement about method, results or interpretation is the point of a learned society. Disparagement of the person who produced the work is not, and the difference is usually obvious to everyone except the person crossing it.
Assume the other person is competent and writing in a second language. The Society's members work in more than a hundred countries. A message that reads as blunt or as over-formal is almost always a translation, not an attitude.
Credit properly. Cite the work you build on. Name everyone who did the work. Do not present another person's data, figures or words as your own.
Say if you have an interest. If you have a commercial stake in a technology you are presenting, reviewing or recommending, say so at the time. Nobody minds a company being a company; people mind finding out afterwards.
Respect a decision to withdraw. A person may leave a group, withdraw a submission or ask to be removed from a mailing list without giving a reason.
What is not acceptable
- Harassment, in any form. This includes unwanted sexual attention, persistent unwanted contact, and demeaning comments about a person's nationality, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexuality, disability, age, appearance or institution.
- Threats, intimidation, or encouraging others to do either.
- Publishing anything about a person that they have not chosen to make public, including where they live and what they are doing.
- Deliberate misrepresentation of research, whether your own or somebody else's: fabricated data, manipulated images, plagiarism, or authorship that does not reflect who did the work.
- Using the Society's name, membership list or channels to advertise, to recruit, or to solicit business, unless the Society has agreed to it.
- Sustained disruption of a talk, a workshop or a discussion.
Reporting
Write to secretary@wsset.org. A report is read by the Society's officers and by nobody else. Say what happened, when, and who was involved, and whether you would like to be contacted about it.
A report will not be shared with the person it concerns without telling you first. If you would prefer the matter simply to be noted and not acted on, say so, and it will be.
If the report concerns an officer of the Society, write to the Chair directly and it will be handled without that person's involvement.
What happens next
The Society will acknowledge a report within five working days, and will say what it intends to do within twenty.
The Society may: take no action; ask the person to stop; require an apology; remove a submission or a posting; exclude the person from a group, an event or the Society itself; or, in a case involving research misconduct, inform the person's institution or the relevant journal. Which of those applies depends on what happened, whether it was repeated, and whether the person recognises the problem.
Membership can be ended by the board. Where that happens, the member is told why, and no fee is refunded.
The limits of this document
This is a code of conduct, not a legal process. It does not replace the law, an institution's own procedures, or a journal's misconduct policy, and nothing in it stops anybody from going to any of those instead of, or as well as, coming here.
Serious matters, and particularly anything involving a criminal offence or a risk to someone's safety, should go to the police or to the relevant institution first. The Society will cooperate with either.