Community Guidelines / Code of Conduct

Meta
#1

I’d love to discuss the approach we want to take for the Code of Conduct for the forum so we can ensure clear communication of acceptable and unacceptable behaviours up-front.

#2

I would also like this !

maybe we could start by collecting some codes of conduct / community guidelines from other groups that we think work well

here is one:

and here is a whole are.na channel of them:

perhaps we can also find some forum-specific ones

#3

Great idea! Thanks for the Are.na link. I’ll take a look through those and search for others which might form a solid foundation.

#4

Linking a few more examples of community guidelines before I take a first-pass at drafting ours:

#5

@notplants @Lando

Here’s my first-pass at a code of conduct (heavily based on Rust’s CoC). If you have a chance to take a look, I’d be grateful to hear any feedback you might have.

Hyphal Fusion Network

Community Guidelines / Code of Conduct

  • We are committed to providing a friendly, safe and welcoming environment for all, regardless of level of experience, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, personal appearance, body size, race, ethnicity, age, religion, nationality, or other similar characteristic.
  • Please avoid using overtly sexual aliases or other nicknames that might detract from a friendly, safe and welcoming environment for all.
  • Please be kind and courteous. There’s no need to be mean or rude.
  • Respect that people have differences of opinion and that every technique or method carries a trade-off and numerous costs. There are many paths to be explored when practicing mycology; celebrate the process of experimentation and learning.
  • Please keep unsolicited critique to a minimum. If you have solid ideas you want to experiment with, make a thread of your own and share your findings.
  • We will exclude you from interaction if you insult, demean or harass anyone. That is not welcome behavior. In particular, we don’t tolerate behavior that excludes people in socially marginalized groups.
  • Private harassment is also unacceptable. No matter who you are, if you feel you have been or are being harassed or made uncomfortable by a community member, please contact one of Hyphal Fusion Network moderation team immediately. If you feel a post has violated our code of conduct, please flag it for a member of the moderation team to handle. Whether you’re a regular contributor or a newcomer, we care about making this community a safe place for you and we’ve got your back.
  • Spamming, trolling, flaming, baiting or other attention-stealing behavior is not welcome.

Moderation

These are the policies for upholding our community’s standards of conduct. If you feel that a thread needs moderation, please contact the Hyphal Fusion Network moderation team.

  • Remarks that violate the Hyphal Fusion Network standards of conduct, including hateful, hurtful, oppressive, or exclusionary remarks, are not allowed.
  • Remarks that moderators find inappropriate, whether listed in the code of conduct or not, are also not allowed.
  • Moderators will first respond to such remarks with a warning.
  • If the warning is unheeded, the user will be “silenced” for a pre-determined period based on the severity of the offense, i.e., prevented from posting or starting topics (a cool-off period).
  • If the user comes back and continues to make trouble, they will be banned, i.e., indefinitely excluded through account suspension (prevents use login).
  • Moderators may choose at their discretion to un-ban the user if it was a first offense and they offer the offended party a genuine apology.
  • If a moderator bans someone and you think it was unjustified, please take it up with that moderator, or with a different moderator, in private. Complaints about bans in-channel are not allowed.
  • Moderators are held to a higher standard than other community members. If a moderator creates an inappropriate situation, they should expect less leeway than others.

These community guidelines have been adapted from the Code of conduct for the Rust programming language.

#6

This looks great, thank you for doing this research and creating this.

I think this code of conduct is good enough for this mycology forum. Particularly appreciate the section outlining how moderation works.

also love this line
“Respect that people have differences of opinion and that every technique or method carries a trade-off and numerous costs. There are many paths to be explored when practicing mycology; celebrate the process of experimentation and learning.”

I started to look at some other details, but as I looked into I started to feel like it could take a lifetime to make a better code of conduct and this is currently beyond the scope of this forum. So I would vote to use this, but for your curiosity or future readers here are some things I thought about that perhaps could be incorporated into a future code of conduct.

apologizing vs accountability
… what is a genuine apology?
… this is coming up in a lot of spaces in my life now. what is transformative justice, what is accountability, how can someone do harm and then genuinely acknowledge the harm and commit to doing the work to do better in the future? what could a framework for accountability look like?
e.g.

avoiding tone policing
… asking people to be “friendly” could be read as enforcing a certain type of suburban normative tone. I might remove the line “Please be kind and courteous. There’s no need to be mean or rude.” Something like “Speak from the heart” resonates with me more than “be courteous”. But this is a semantic point, and its pretty subjective

the first line… I would like to say something about making the space safe/r for marginalized people and not just making it welcoming to all people. Similar to debate of All Lives Matter vs Black Lives Matter.
perhaps,
“We are committed to providing a safe and welcoming environment for all regardless of level of experience, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, personal appearance, body size, race, ethnicity, age, religion or nationality. We center the voices of marginalized people and actively seek to moderate against behavior which reinforces oppression.”

I still like the cloud 9 code of conduct (https://cloud9.support/communityguidelines). I think most of these issues won’t really come up in this forum, and that code of conduct makes more sense for an activist group than an informational forum. But a part of me is like… radical mycology… this is also an activist group :slight_smile:

SFPC (the school for poetic computation) is currently in the process of revising their code of conduct to better support bipoc students and address other issues. They are putting some energy into this and I can keep an eye on it and see if they come up with some language that we could also consider.

But as I started with, I would vote my approval on this code of conduct for the foreseeable future and imagine we can also update this more if things come up and we feel we need to

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#7

Ok code of conduct is here: Code Of Conduct

it’s pinned to the meta topic, linked to in the hamburger menu, and also linked to next to the about page

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