The Rands Leadership Slack ("RLS") is an online community dedicated to the craft of leadership. While many of the channels are not specifically focused on leadership, all participants in this community are expected to act like leaders and required to comply with the following Code of Conduct. Administrators will enforce this code throughout the Rands Leadership Slack.
Be a leader. Be respectful of other people, respectfully ask people to stop if you are bothered; respect privacy; understand we’re mostly not-for-profit; and if you can’t resolve an issue with someone else you should contact the Administrators. If you are being a problem, it will be made clear to you, and you may be asked to leave the Rands Leadership Slack.
The Rands Leadership Slack is a community dedicated to developing the craft of leadership. We recognize and celebrate the creativity and collaboration of our independent members and the diversity of skills, talents, experiences, cultures, and opinions that they bring to your community. The Rands Leadership Slack is an inclusive environment, based on treating all individuals respectfully, regardless of gender or gender identity (including transgender status), sexual orientation, age, disability, nationality, ethnicity, religion (or lack thereof), political affiliation, or career path.
We value respectful behavior above individual opinions.
Respectful behavior includes but is not limited to:
- Be considerate, kind, constructive, and helpful.
- Avoid demeaning, discriminatory, harassing, hateful, or physically threatening behavior, speech, and imagery.
- If you’re not sure, ask someone instead of assuming. No, really. Just ask the Administrators. We’d rather hear from you than hear about something you said or did after the fact, and we are here to help.
- Don’t be a bystander, be a leader. Role model respectful behaviour, but also help to address disrespect when you see it.
Disrespectful behavior outside this community by active members may be considered a violation of this code of conduct at the discretion of the Administrators.
This community is not a public space. However, no one has signed an non-disclosure agreement (“NDA”) to participate, and you should not presume anything you say here will remain private, so act accordingly. Protect IP and legally-protected information.
If you want to publicly disclose anything discussed here in a public channel, use the Chatham House Rule as the guideline (“participants are free to use the information received, but neither the identity nor the affiliation of the speaker(s), nor that of any other participant, may be revealed”).
For attribution of specific content found on this Slack on public channels, we ask that you ask the originator of the content for permission. If you don’t receive consent in a reasonable period of time, we ask that you credit the “Rands Leadership Slack.”
Sharing of content from private channels is discouraged.
This is large community with a great many different humans populating hundreds of channels. Different channels have organically developed different personalities. We suggest that before posting in a channel with hundreds of members that you take the time read the room. Specifically:
- Read the last couple days of messages.
- Examine the channel topic for helpful tips.
- Click on the channel details and read the about section, get a sense for how many members are present, and what messages have already been pinned and what files have been shared.
Posting the same message to multiple channels is spamming. Don't spam.
A direct message (“DM”) is a private message to one or more other members. Sending a DM to another member who you don’t know might be jarring for the receiver. Prior to sending a DM to member you’ve never contacted, consider the following:
- Will it be obvious to the other member why I am privately contacting them? If not, should I provide context such as a public post?
- Could this message be considered unsolicited spam? If so, should you be sending it?
This is not a place for obvious commercial activities such as recruiting, marketing, or other solicitation, except in channels dedicated to that purpose.
If you join this community simply to take value rather than contribute, the community will quickly notice and react. A recurring example of this type of behavior is your first non-introductory post to the community including marketing, survey, or other obvious commercial activity. Non-obvious and quasi-commerical activity includes (but is not limited to) well-intentioned user surveys of a specific channel, responding to a request for tools or services with information about a company, or posts which are blatantly fronts for commercial interests.
In general, our guidelines are that you:
- Ask permission of the channel before posting the solicitation or information
- State clear intent for the purpose
- Listen for the response of your peers in channel and act accordingly
If after productively engaging with the community, you are wondering whether a specific message is commercial or not, please ask in channel and/or calibrate in one of the channels dedicated to helping people find their way in this community (#how-to-rands or #rands-slack-rules).
In the case of surveys, there is an additional set of requirements. Members interested in surveying a channel must clearly state in the channel they intend to survey:
- The goal of the survey
- How the data will be used
- When and how the results will be shared with the channel
Examples of channels which currently explicitly allow commercial activity include:
- #conferences
- #consulting-gigs
- #forsale
- #ibuiltsomething
- #iwrotesomething
- #jobs
- #remote-jobs
- #services
- #watches
- #wedidit
Some geographically-focused channels have a higher tolerance for specific kinds of commercial activity focused on events based in that region. Again, read the room.
In channels where commercial activity is allowed, it is just as unwelcome to post an unrelated commercial offering as it is to post in non-commercial channels.
Commercial requests via direct messages (“DM”) without prior and/or obvious consent from the receiver are prohibited.
As a leadership community, we believe peer-to-peer discussions, feedback, and corrections can help build a stronger, safer, more informed, and more welcoming community.
If you see someone violating any part of this Code of Conduct, we urge you to respectfully dissuade them from such behavior using this document if necessary. Expect that others in the community wish to help keep the community respectful, and welcome your input in doing so.
If you experience disrespectful behavior toward yourself or anyone else and feel in any way unable or unwilling to respond or resolve it respectfully (for any reason), please immediately bring it to the attention of an Administrator. We want to hear from you about anything that you feel is disrespectful, threatening, or just something that could make someone feel distressed in any way. We will listen and work to resolve the matter with your help.
Should you catch yourself behaving disrespectfully, or be confronted as such, listen intently, own up to your words and actions, and apologize accordingly. No one is perfect, and even well-intentioned people make mistakes. What matters is how you handle them and that you avoid repeating them in the future. We are here to learn.
If you are unable to resolve a situation peacefully, please refer to our Incident Process and choose a course of action that suits the situation.
If the Administrators determine that a human is violating any part of this Code of Conduct, the Administrators may take any action they deem appropriate within this Slack team, up to and including expulsion and exclusion from the Rands Leadership Slack.
As Administrators, we will seek to resolve conflicts peacefully and in a manner that is positive for the community. We can’t foresee every situation, and thus if in the Administrator's judgment the best thing to do is to ask a disrespectful individual to leave, we will do so.
If you feel a message should be deleted, please refer to our overview of Deleting Content.
The Administrator(s) of Rands Leadership as of November 2020:
- @mcole
- @okterok
- @erin.disselhorst
- @cjhuitt
- @supine
- @rands (also the workspace owner)
You can contact them directly or posting in the #rands-admins channel with your questions or concerns.
The current term of the volunteer Administrations is November 2nd, 2020 until November 2nd, 2021.
Thank you to every Rands Leadership Slack community member for helping to make our home the respectful and inclusive community that it is.
Thanks to Tantek Çelik, and the other organizers of IndieWebCamp for creating and sharing the Code of Conduct on which this one is based. If you question the need for a Code of Conduct, please see this.
This Code of Conduct is released under the CC0 public domain license.
V3.00 of this Code of Conduct was published on December 26th, 2020.