Slack Governance Policy

[the-simian]

This can be subject to amendment based on board majority, if we learn new ways to properly run the slack channels

1. Members violating the CoC are subject to being banned. All activity in Slack channels must conform to the agreed upon CoC that all usergroups and events follow. This includes non harassment policy.
2. No Solicitation Policy. The Slack forums are a way to conduct usergroup and developer activity in Oklahoma. It is not a place to post jobs, sell goods or otherwise conduct for-profit business in the virtual space. Infraction results in a warning first, and then a ban. This extends to public channels, private channels and private messages.

[jagthedrummer]

@the-simian I feel like maybe my last comment didn't get the fairest of reads from you. I very specifically said that I'm against recruiters abusing our community and that maybe we need a seperate rule just for them. I also said that the #promotions thing is less of a big deal for me. But your response, seemingly to me, focused almost exclusively on the recruiter scenario and how to deal with promotions. I tried to make it very clear that I'm concerned that we've been over litigious towards legitimate community members who have been engaged in types of activity that I think we ought to be trying to promote. It seems I wasn't clear enough about that.

[jagthedrummer]

I like @DevinClark's latest wording, and I like @rhoegg's suggestions, and I like @energydev's recommendation to remove the bit about the private repo. Combining all of that would give us this:

---

The Techlahoma community is made up of hobbyists, professionals, and volunteers who come together to advance Oklahoma's technology. Diversity is one of our biggest strengths, but it can also bring increased communication challenges at times. We've established a few rules in order to encourage respect, collaboration, and open discussion. We also provide a remediation process so that members feel welcome and safe

Follow the Techlahoma CoC.

Act in the best interest of the community.

This chat is actively moderated. Acts of questionable behavior will be dealt with at the discretion of two or more moderators.

Examples of "acts of questionable behavior" and how they were handled include (but are not limited to) the following:

• Spam, politely asked to stop.
• Harassing an/or threatening a fellow member, ban
• Compromised accounts, temporarily disabling account.

The above sections should be treated as a living document.

(please replace with actual moderator info) Techlahoma moderators are well informed on how to deal with incidents. Report the incident (preferably in writing) to one of the moderators listed below.

• @barackobama: Barack Obama, President of the United States 2008-2016
• @nelsonmandela: Community Activist, Statesman
• @adaharlin: Kind of a Big Deal

[DevinClark]

I am in favor of the revised version @jagthedrummer posted.

[rhoegg]

+1. Except please actually put in the real moderators. :)

On Sun, Dec 25, 2016 at 7:42 PM, Devin Clark notifications@github.com wrote:

I am in favor of the revised version @jagthedrummer https://github.com/jagthedrummer posted.

— You are receiving this because you were mentioned. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub https://github.com/techlahoma/board_meetings/issues/31#issuecomment-269146968, or mute the thread https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AACuD_VKZjFvDVqPbWXuF2-vAj_YH0CBks5rLxuagaJpZM4HbrBy .

[energydev]

The revised version looks great to me, as well. Since the version may be one that you guys are going to vote on next month, I'll go ahead and mention a very minor typo. Should probably change "an/or" to "and/or".

[the-simian]

@jagthedrummer you're correct that I did focus on those particular scenarios, because I felt that we've correctly identified some problems but in my mind hadn't really followed through and solved the problems I was trying to highlight. I know you said we might need a separate rule for recruiters, but I'm trying to express the difficulty of having a rule that targets certain professions. On some level recruiters and those folks as individuals may be members of the community or even our sponsors. I don't feel like making a rule "against recruiters" is a good solution, because I don't things are that simple.

I was also trying to express how important having a clear rule about that sort of thing is, and i'd like to see it. I also think we may not share the same opinion about promotions (generally speaking), but I think I have a solution for that. Moving forward, I think there is a solution that will work for everyone.

Its pretty simple: Just enforce the right topic/rules per channel. This means by its nature, announcements isn't a place to post jobs because its for announcing events, but job-talk is. This means if we have an #entrepreneurial channel, and they love that sort of thing, more power to them, but maybe another channel wouldn't. The inhabitants of a channel, and moderators get to decide. I think this solves the problem of preventing any particular, single #spam channel (which is a fair point) but also gives folks a per-channel opt in to whatever they want (so the whole board isn't a #spam channel). Most importantly it puts the power-to-decide in the actual channel's community, which I think we both want. It also gives more discretion to the channel mod, which we can all agree every situation is very contextual.

Another thing I wanted to add was to not actually upload and distribute viruses/malware on our slack. Believe it or not this has come up before. I know the infosec crowd has an academic interest in such things, and most are fine with just hosting on github and linking to that. I just don't want a situation where someone clicks in something in our slack and we actually hosted a virus or something that does some damage. That 'academic malware' can live on someone else's servers/services.

Ok here's a revision with that in mind, and also with the updates @rhoegg, @energydev, and others requested

---

The Techlahoma community is made up of hobbyists, professionals, and volunteers who come together to advance Oklahoma's grassroots technology community. Diversity is one of our biggest strengths, but it can also bring increased communication challenges at times. We've established a few rules in order to encourage respect, collaboration, and open discussion. We also provide a remediation process so that members feel welcome and safe

Here are some guidelines:

• Follow the Techlahoma CoC.
• Act in the best interest of the community.
• Be considerate and think twice about using the @channel.
• Feel free to create new channels if one doesn't exist that you'd like to see.
• This chat is actively moderated.
• Acts of questionable behavior will be dealt with at the discretion of the moderators.

Exhibits of "acts of questionable behavior" and how they were handled include (but are not limited to) the following:

• Spam; politely asked to stop.
• Disrespecting the rules, topic and conventions in a particular channel; asked to go to the correct channel/read the rules.
• Uploading or using our slack to host malicious software; asked to remove it from our servers/slack
• Harassment, or threatening others; ban/police report.
• Compromised accounts, temporarily disabling account.

The above sections should be treated as a living document.

Techlahoma moderators are well informed on how to deal with incidents. Report the incident (preferably in writing) to one of the moderators listed below, or posting in the #ask-a-mod channel

@the-simian: Jesse Harlin @seejessicacode: Jessica Campbell @amandaharlin: Amanda Harlin @ddev: Devin Clark @blazedd: Jonathan Yarbor

[CaptainYarb]

disclamer: I was out of town for nearly a week, but still wanted to weigh in on a few of these topics. Sorry if I re-open the dialog on something we've already moved past. <book>

Singling out recruiters.

This is actually pretty normal, especially in Sillicon Valley. I've seen a few meeups literally charge recruiters for an otherwise free event. I think this makes sense, considering usergroups are so relevant to their job content. I don't know if it's the right thing for us to do. I think there are things we might consider by incentivizing the recruiters who honor our community's guidelines. No matter what we do in this direction it'll take a lot of time and energy, other than our current policy.

Spam/Jobs specific channels

We have a LOT of channels. Literally 86 public channels as of this comment. That's a lot of awesome happening. For specific topics, regions, and usergroups I think this makes a lot of sense. If we then have a #jobs channel, it means that it loses all of the context to which group it could apply. I'd also argue that any sponsor which may have wanted more attention to their job/website/product to a particular group would lose nearly all of it's value. On the opposite side of the argument without a specific restriction their sponsorship may not even be required if ANYONE can "share" without a sponsorship. I think we're looking for a silver bullet for an otherwise complex problem.

Moderation

My perspective on all of this is that we should be 100% reactionary to the way our community behaves. From the few incidents I've seen where we've pushed others to the job board we've been met by a LOT of negative attention by non-participants of the original conversation. I believe if we attempt to pre-filter our community with rules like this it may lead to a semi-hostile environment where people might be unsure if they can even talk about something.

I think we should be considering the worst case scenario between a restrictive policy vs a reactive policy:

• Reactive: We notify the user that we have received complaints about their activity. Our guidelines would then back this claim up, which means we then take appropriate action. In the absolute worst case scenario we document the messages in question PUBLICLY, and remove the offending messages.
• Restrictive: Regardless if the activity was problematic we would need to enforce our policy and confront the user. If we do not then there's a potential for arguments about previous incidences going unpunished. This is a bit of a straw man argument, however, our users may then feel like our guidelines may be easily violated. This might even go as far to make users less likely to contribute, in fear of violating the rules.

What I see, in this situation is that we have to react nearly identical, regardless to which policy we take. It requires a moderator and a problem to arise. With the restrictive policy we have moderators prowling for violations, rather than getting actual complaints about actual problems.

We can't prevent everything

We can't stop people from sharing viruses, hijacking websites, or anything else in person either. Having restrictive rules won't stop this either. The reality is that we can only do so much. I don't see us distributing "moderators" around a usergroup to ensure people within the crowd aren't violating the CoC or creating disruptive dialog within a group conversation. We handle these events as they come up or when they are reported. I don't see Slack requiring anything different.

The draft

I think the last draft by @the-simian is pretty spot on. I don't think we need to create a super-list of every deplorable thing someone could do. This is pretty much the same a list from every Terms of Service for any given application. I think the verbiage from those docs should be considered.

</book>