withspectrum / code-of-conduct

The Code of Conduct for all communities on Spectrum

Spectrum Code of Conduct

This policy is a "living" document, and subject to refinement and expansion in the future.

Spectrum is dedicated to providing a harassment-free experience for everyone, regardless of gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, mental illness, neurotype, physical appearance, body, age, race, ethnicity, nationality, language, or religion. We do not tolerate harassment of participants in any form.

This code of conduct applies to all Spectrum-sponsored spaces, including our community, open-source projects, and other spaces that Spectrum hosts, both online and off. Anyone who violates this code of conduct may be sanctioned or expelled from these spaces at the discretion of the Spectrum team.

Some Spectrum-sponsored spaces may have additional rules in place, which will be made clearly available to participants. Participants are responsible for knowing and abiding by these rules.

Definitions

Harassment includes:

• Offensive comments related to gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, mental illness, neurotype, physical appearance, body, age, race, ethnicity, nationality, language, or religion
• Unwelcome comments regarding a person’s lifestyle choices and practices, including those related to food, health, parenting, drugs, and employment.
• Deliberate misgendering or use of ‘dead’ or rejected names
• Gratuitous or off-topic sexual images or behaviour in spaces where they’re not appropriate
• Physical contact and simulated physical contact (eg, textual descriptions like “hug” or “backrub”) without consent or after a request to stop.
• Threats of violence
• Incitement of violence towards any individual, including encouraging a person to commit suicide or to engage in self-harm
• Deliberate intimidation
• Stalking or following
• Harassing photography or recording, including logging online activity for harassment purposes
• Sustained disruption of discussion
• Unwelcome sexual attention
• Pattern of inappropriate social contact, such as requesting/assuming inappropriate levels of intimacy with others
• Continued one-on-one communication after requests to cease
• Deliberate “outing” of any aspect of a person’s identity without their consent except as necessary to protect other Spectrum community members or other vulnerable people from intentional abuse
• Publication of non-harassing private communication without consent by the involved parties

Reporting

If you are being harassed by a member of the Spectrum community, notice that someone else is being harassed, or have any other concerns, please contact one of the Spectrum team members. ([email protected]) If the person who is harassing you is on the team, they will recuse themselves from handling your incident. We will respond as promptly as we can.

This code of conduct applies to Spectrum-sponsored spaces, but if you are being harassed by a member of the Spectrum community outside our spaces, we still want to know about it. We will take all good-faith reports of harassment by Spectrum community members seriously. This includes harassment outside our spaces and harassment that took place at any point in time. The abuse team reserves the right to exclude people from the Spectrum community based on their past behavior, including behavior outside Spectrum spaces and behavior towards people who are not in the Spectrum community.

In order to protect volunteers from abuse and burnout, we reserve the right to reject any report we believe to have been made in bad faith. The Spectrum team are not here to explain power differentials or other basic social justice concepts to you. Reports intended to silence legitimate criticism may be deleted without response.

We will respect confidentiality requests for the purpose of protecting victims of abuse. At our discretion, we may publicly name a person about whom we’ve received harassment complaints, or privately warn third parties about them, if we believe that doing so will increase the safety of Spectrum members or the general public. We will not name harassment victims without their affirmative consent.

Consequences

Participants asked to stop any harassing behavior are expected to comply immediately.

If a participant engages in harassing behavior, the Spectrum team may take any action they deem appropriate, up to and including expulsion from all Spectrum spaces and identification of the participant as a harasser to other Spectrum community members or the general public.

Diversity Statement

Spectrum welcomes and encourages participation by everyone.

No matter how you identify yourself or how others perceive you: we welcome you. We welcome contributions from everyone as long as they interact constructively with our communities.

Adopt a code of conduct in your community

If you would like to adopt a policy similar to this one in your community, we recommend looking at Geek Feminism's community anti-harassment resources, including a freely reusable and modifiable policy.

code-of-conduct's Issues

Some of your guidelines seem unreasonable

I love your software but I feel someone needs to say this:

While it's commendable to want to have a welcoming, safe, and professional community, some of the rules in Code of Conduct seem a little bit extreme, and even hypocritical, and sound like the aggression that's currently overtaken many college campuses. You folks have created an incredible open source project here, why destroy it with such political activism like this...

You are going to ban people who:

• call a biological man "sir" by accident because they didn't know they're transgender, etc.
• say "hugs!" or other cutesy internet terms
• unwanted one-on-one chat (but you prevent disabling DM features)

This code of conduct applies to Spectrum-sponsored spaces, but if you are being harassed by a member of the Spectrum community outside our spaces, we still want to know about it. We will take all good-faith reports of harassment by Spectrum community members seriously. This includes harassment outside our spaces and harassment that took place at any point in time. The abuse team reserves the right to exclude people from the Spectrum community based on their past behavior, including behavior outside Spectrum spaces and behavior towards people who are not in the Spectrum community.

So you prohibit using Spectrum for stalking and harassment, but you encourage your members to stalk and follow each other outside of Spectrum and report on their lifestyle choices and activities that might be offensive to the Spectrum founders? This just sounds kind of scary...

In order to protect volunteers from abuse and burnout, we reserve the right to reject any report we believe to have been made in bad faith. The Spectrum team are not here to explain power differentials or other basic social justice concepts to you. Reports intended to silence legitimate criticism may be deleted without response.

You create extremely arbitrary and demanding behavior guidelines, but then "reserve the right" to ignore users who report being victimized or abused? Certain criticism and harassment of members is "legitimate" and shouldn't waste your time with being reported?

We will respect confidentiality requests for the purpose of protecting victims of abuse. At our discretion, we may publicly name a person about whom we’ve received harassment complaints, or privately warn third parties about them, if we believe that doing so will increase the safety of Spectrum members or the general public. We will not name harassment victims without their affirmative consent.

And you also threaten to publicly name or criticize your members that you might disagree with in regard to their behavior on or off the Spectrum platform? I'm not even sure what this means, but it certainly doesn't sound very "welcoming"...

Anyway I know your platform is rather new, and your team is probably very tired with various bug reports and complaints and are trying to establish rules to make things easier to manage but with all respect, I encourage you to come up with more "mainstream" Terms Of Use.

Thanks so much for your time and efforts. Cheers!

Is this an open source, can I contribute?

Hey, I was wondering if I could contribute? I could start out by writing a CONTRIBUTION.md and look around for any other issues that I could help with.

Add CONTRIBUTING.md

We should add a CONTRIBUTING.md to make sure folks know that this is a living document and we want them to comment on/improve it.

Add contact information

We should add contact information to the README in case somebody who's been harassed is looking for the right place to contact us. Do we have an email address for this in place yet?

Add a diversity statement

Something like the ones listed here: http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Diversity_statement