Code of Conduct: Expectations for Community Participation

If you're going to start a community, it's important that participants know what they're signing up for and what they can expect from you as a host. Many organizations do this through a code of conduct, and we love the idea so we did too.

Our Uncommon Code of Conduct, published when we launched our Slack, is inspired by Contributor Covenant, Django Code of Conduct, and a dash of Discourse.

Starting your own community? Feel free to adapt ours to fit your community's needs. For a guide on the other important elements to consider while setting up your community, check out the blog How to Set Community Standards.

Uncommon Code of Conduct

We believe that diverse people, perspectives, and experiences make communities and go-to-market (GTM) builders, including Sales, Success, Marketing, GTM Ops, Community, and DevRel, stronger.

We also believe that while the idea of 'community' is simple, it doesn't mean it's easy—the differences in people and perspectives that make communities strong can also, hopefully very infrequently, result in misunderstandings or worse.

We're publishing our Uncommon Code of Conduct because we believe it's important that everyone in the Uncommon community knows the expectations for participating in it. If you have an idea for making these expectations more clear, more inclusive, or more impactful, please let us know. We're here to grow together.

If you decide to participate in the Uncommon community in any capacity, virtual or in-person, we expect you to follow our Uncommon Code of Conduct, as we describe it here.

Purpose of this community

We host our community workspace, channels, and events to make it easier for GTM leaders, individual contributors, and learners to hear, support, and connect with one another, with a special focus on educating and empowering Common Room users looking to grow and share knowledge about delivering value to their teams, organizations, and members through the platform.

Our Slack workspace is primarily intended for conversations with others who work in GTM-focused roles or would like to learn more about them. We ask you to use your real name as well as your company or organization's real name—many of you may develop professional relationships through your conversations here, and it's best to build trust from the beginning.

For conversations outside of a professional capacity, we've got a channel for non-GTM-related banter! Perhaps unsurprisingly, we've named that channel #03-banter and we invite you to chitchat away. As a quick note to that, we still reserve the right to remove blatantly off-topic or self-promotional content if it kills the conversation for everyone else.

What follows isn't an exhaustive list of things that should or shouldn't be done. Rather, we ask you to take it in the spirit in which it’s intended—as a set of expectations that make participating in the Uncommon community a more enriching, engaging, and inviting experience for everyone.

Our commitment

As hosts of the Uncommon community, we commit to making it a healthy and inclusive community for all.

We welcome everyone interested in learning about and building modern GTM motions regardless of age, gender identity and expression, sexual identity and orientation, body size, visible or invisible disability, ethnicity, sex characteristics, level of experience, education, socio-economic status, nationality, personal appearance, race, caste, color, religion, and any other group or reason not explicitly addressed above.

We commit to acting and interacting in ways that contribute to a welcoming, diverse, and engaging community, and to actively seek feedback for ways to improve it.

To maintain a healthy and inclusive space, we have a zero-tolerance policy for harassment of any kind. We commit to respectfully and privately having difficult conversations and to taking difficult actions, if necessary, to promote and sustain the type of healthy and inclusive community we describe above.

Our behavior expectations

Some of the best examples of behavior we see across healthy, thriving communities include:

• Demonstrating empathy and kindness toward other people
• Being respectful of differing opinions, viewpoints, and experiences
• Giving and gracefully accepting constructive feedback
• Accepting responsibility for and apologizing to those affected by mistakes, and learning from the experience
• Listening and speaking, contributing and borrowing (with permission), asking and answering
• Leading with value to help your peers in the community, including offering context behind content you’re sharing in that space to help others understand what you found useful

Some of the examples of behavior that we will not tolerate in the Uncommon community include:

• The use of sexualized language or imagery, or sexual attention or advances of any kind
• Trolling, insulting or derogatory comments, or personal or political attack
• Public or private harassment
• Publishing others’ private information, such as a physical or email address, without their explicit permission
• Sharing or soliciting illegal content
• Publicly posting or privately sending unsolicited, purely sales-motivated content, as well as including calendar links, requesting product feedback, and conducting market research–this behavior is self-serving rather than value-additive to the community as a whole
• Requesting personal information such as financial or other private details that can be used with mal-intent
• Other conduct which could reasonably be considered inappropriate in a professional setting

Enforcement: Someone has to, and that someone is us

We're committed to keeping our commitment above. If you encounter a violation of our Code of Conduct or behavior expectations before the Uncommon team sees it, please let us know right away by at-mentioning a member of the Uncommon team (we identify ourselves in our display names) or by sending an email to conduct@commonroom.io.

We'll review, investigate, and respond to complaints promptly and fairly, and we'll take any necessary and appropriate actions. If helpful to the community as a whole, we may post further details of specific enforcement policies, decision-making processes, or updated expectations. We put your privacy and security first, and we'll respect the privacy of anyone who submits a report.

As we said above, as hosts of this community it's our job to have the hard conversations and take difficult actions. As the Uncommon community team, we hold the right and responsibility to remove posts, comments, and other contributions that don't align with our community Code of Conduct and temporarily or permanently suspend any member for other behaviors deemed inappropriate, threatening, offensive, or harmful.

We'll continue our commitment to actively seek feedback for ways to improve, elevate, and deliver an excellent community experience.

Connect with us

We're committed to being a member-first, value-additive community that supports you and is here for you—whether it’s to receive feedback, handle a conduct issue, or anything else.

If you need us, reach out anytime in Uncommon via DM or email us at conduct@commonroom.io.

In Uncommon, you can find us through our display names:

• Rebecca Marshburn, Head of Community at Common Room – @Rebecca (Uncommon Team)
• Joel Primack, Community Lead (fractional) at Common Room – @Joel (Uncommon Team)

That's the long of it.

The short of it? We're uncommonly glad you're here.