Politechs Code of Conduct
Longer version
Politechs is dedicated to providing a harassment-free experience for everyone. We do not tolerate harassment of participants in any form.
This code of conduct applies to all Politechs community spaces, including Signal groups, the Politechs website, and Politechs software projects, both online and off. Anyone who violates this code of conduct may be sanctioned or expelled from these spaces at the discretion of the abuse team.
Some Politechs community 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.
The Politechs community is not a debate stage; rather it is intended to be a safe space for people to explore the political project behind technology. Challenging each other's ideas to help sharpen our analysis is fine; debating is not. How we differentiate between the two is that if you are anchored on a point and trying to convince others that you're right, that's debating. If you're asking genuine questions to understand someone's position and clarifying your own, and are open to your ideas evolving as a result, that's a good faith discussion.
the abuse team have developed a set of rules of engagement to provide a platform for good faith discussions. Politechs community members are expected to be familiar with the rules of engagement and strive to follow them in community discussions.
Furthermore, we have an expectation that Politechs community members share enough context around politics and technology to talk through new ideas rather than argue about old ones. A good way to sum up our philosophy is "if your tech criticism isn't intersectional, it isn't welcome here."
We have a zero-tolerance policy for harassment of any kind, including but not limited to:
- Offensive comments related to gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, mental illness, neuro(a)typicality, physical appearance, body size, age, race, 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.
- 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 vulnerable people from intentional abuse.
- Publication of non-harassing private communication.
Politechs prioritizes marginalized people's safety over privileged people's comfort. the abuse team reserve the right not to act on complaints regarding:
- "Reverse" -isms, including "reverse racism," "reverse sexism," and "cisphobia".
- Reasonable communication of boundaries, such as "leave me alone," "go away," or "I'm not discussing this with you."
- Communicating in a 'tone' you don't find congenial.
- Criticizing racist, sexist, cissexist, or otherwise oppressive behavior or assumptions.
Reporting
If you are being harassed by a member of the Politechs community, notice that someone else is being harassed, or have any other concerns, please contact the abuse team at <abuse.team@politechs.dev>. If the person who is harassing you is on the team, they will recuse themselves from handling your incident. In this case, you may wish to contact another abuse team member directly:
- Josh: <josh@politechs.dev>
- Ray: <ray@politechs.dev>
- Erika: <erika@politechs.dev>
This code of conduct applies to Politechs community spaces, but if you are being harassed by a member of the Politechs community outside our spaces, we still want to know about it. We will take all good-faith reports of harassment by Politechs community members seriously, especially reports about a member of the abuse team. 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 Politechs community based on their past behaviour, including behaviour outside Politechs community spaces and behaviour towards people who are not in the Politechs 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. 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 Politechs community 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 abuse team may take any action they deem appropriate, up to and including expulsion from all Politechs community spaces and identification of the participant as a harasser to other Politechs community members or the general public.
Licence and attribution
This anti-harassment policy is based on the example policy from the Geek Feminism wiki, created by the Geek Feminism community.
This policy is licensed under the Creative Commons Zero license.