Official Announcement from the IGDORE Global Board Addressing OpenCon’s Ban of Dr. Jon Tennant

One of IGDORE’s researchers, Dr. Jon Tennant, has been banned from OpenCon for violation of its Code of Conduct (CoC). Dr. Tennant has made a public statement of apology and acceptance of the ban.

There has been much speculation on Twitter about the nature of the breach. In addition there have been calls on Twitter for IGDORE to share our viewpoints in the matter.

The IGDORE Global Board consists of four members: Dr. Gavin Taylor, Dr. Enrico Fucci, Mr. Daniel Berntsson, and Dr. Rebecca Willén. Only the latter member is active on Twitter. The Global Board would not have been aware of OpenCon’s ban or anything else concerning this case had none of them been on Twitter. We encourage anybody who wishes to communicate formally with the IGDORE Global Board to email board@igdore.org as these emails will be received by all board members.

IGDORE is an academic federation consisting of independent organisations, laboratories, and individual researchers. The federation is coordinated by the Global Board. Each and every individual researcher at IGDORE may freely discuss publicly any matter they choose to discuss, so long as they abide with our Code of Conduct. This freedom applies also to each of the members of the Global Board.

IGDORE currently employs a CoC that is solely focused on the scientific and ethical quality of research output and communication about the research. As such does it not address behavioural factors that can influence the ways in which we work together as a research community. We are currently in consultation for the development of a behavioural policy and welcome input from all members of the IGDORE community. A public forum thread dedicated to such input has been created. Deadline for input is December 23rd, 2019. We intend to finalise the behavioural policy during January 2020 and publicly announce the policy shortly thereafter.

For inquiries about this statement, please email board@igdore.org.