Code of Conduct. Our rules and procedures.

The alphalist CTO Community is a network for connecting top CTOs. 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 our community. The alphalist CTO Community 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:

Disrespectful behavior outside this community by active members may be considered a violation of this code of conduct at the discretion of the Administrators.

alphalist is dedicated to providing a harassment-free experience for everyone. We do not tolerate harassment of participants in any form.

Harassment includes:

alphalist prioritizes marginalized people's safety over privileged people's comfort. The alphalist team reserves the right not to act on complaints regarding:

02.1reporting

If you are being harassed by a member of alphalist, notice that someone else is being harassed, or have any other concerns, please contact the alphalist team at [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 alphalist spaces, but if you are being harassed by a member of alphalist outside our spaces, we still want to know about it. We will take all good-faith reports of harassment by alphalist members, especially by the alphalist organisers, 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 alphalist based on their past behavior, including behavior outside alphalist spaces and behavior towards people who are not in alphalist.

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 alphalist members or the general public. We will not name harassment victims without their affirmative consent.

This community is not a public space. However, no one has signed a 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 public channels of this Slack, 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 “alphalist CTO Community.”

Sharing of content from private channels is discouraged.

This is a 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, you take the time to read the room. Specifically:

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 a member you've never contacted, consider the following:

This is not a place for obvious commercial activities such as recruiting, lead generation, marketing, and 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.

While obvious commercial behavior is easy to identify, non-obvious commercial behavior is a grey area. In general, if you are wondering if a post is commercial, our guideline is that you contact an administrator and hear their thoughts.

06.1approved_commercial_channels

On-topic and relevant commercial activity is allowed in these channels:

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. If you'd like to request approval for a channel to be listed as commercial, please contact the Administrators.

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.

06.2surveys

We've received many requests to run surveys in specific channels. Members interested in surveying a channel must clearly state in the channel they intend to survey:

As a technical 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 that 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 contact an administrator on next steps.

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 alphalist CTO Community.

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 Administrators' judgment the best thing to do is to ask a disruptive individual to leave, we will do so.

The Administrators of the alphalist CTO Slack as of December 2021:

You can contact them directly by clicking on their names.

09.1administrator_information_access

As part of the role, Administrators have information not available to all users. This information includes:

Administrators do not have access to private channels unless they are a member of that channel.

As part of Code of Conduct investigations, Administrators may choose to access this information. Administrators may also request information from private channels from current channel members to investigate a Code of Conduct violation.

Administrators may use the above information as part of a Code of Conduct investigation. Usage of this information unrelated to administrator work is forbidden and will be treated as a Code of Conduct violation.

Thank you to every alphalist CTO Community member for helping to make our home the respectful and inclusive community that it is.

This code of conduct is primarily based on the Code of Conduct from the Rands Leadership Slack, which in turn is based on the Code of Conduct of the IndieWebCamp. Both were released under the CC0 public domain license.

Our anti-harassment policy is based on the example policy provided by the Geek Feminism wiki.