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 of 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 a diversity of people, perspectives, and experiences makes communities, and community-driven builders, 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 much 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 workspaces, channels, and events to make it easier for community-driven leaders and learners to hear, support, and connect with one another. Our Slack workspace is primarily intended for conversations with others who build, run, and manage communities, 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 non-community related banter, we've got a channel for that! Perhaps unsurprisingly, we've named that channel #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 guidelines 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 community 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 the difficult conversations and to taking the potentially difficult actions necessary to promote and sustain the type of healthy and inclusive community we describe above.

Our Community Guidelines

Some of the best examples of behavior we see across positive and 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

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
• Repeatedly posting or privately sending unsolicited, purely sales-motivated content
• 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 community guidelines 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 guidelines. We put your privacy and security first, and we'll respect the privacy of anyone who submits a report.

Like we said above, as hosts of this community it's our job to have the hard conversations and take potentially difficult actions. As the Uncommon community team, we hold the right and responsibility to remove posts, comments, and other contributions that don't align to our community Code of Conduct, as well as to temporarily or permanently suspend any member for other behaviors deemed inappropriate, threatening, offensive, or harmful. If appropriate, we'll communicate our moderation decisions to community members, and we'll continue our commitment to actively seek feedback for ways we can improve, elevate, and deliver an excellent community experience for all.

That's the long of it.

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