Code of Conduct

Purpose

Queer Design Club hopes to cultivate a diverse and active community where LGBTQ+ designers build each other up, share ideas and work, and enjoying each other’s company.

To create a space for that, we are committed to providing a friendly, safe and welcoming environment for all, regardless of gender, sexual orientation, physical appearance, body size, professional experience and education (or lack thereof), ability, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, religion (or lack thereof) and other personal conditions and choices.

Expected Behavior

We ask you embody the following values in Queer Design Club: respect, inclusion, openness, support and community. (these values are also handy in life).

• Participate in an authentic and active way. In doing so, you contribute to the health and longevity of this community.
• Use gender-inclusive language. Avoid ablelist language.
• Refrain from demeaning, discriminatory, or harassing behavior and speech.
• Avoid making assumptions about pronouns, gender, or sexual orientation. Also avoid making assumptions about what technical/professional knowledge someone does or does not possess.
• Before sharing anything posted in the community elsewhere, ask the original poster for their consent. When asking consent, confirm whether they are comfortable having content attributed to them or if they prefer you anonymize it.
• Ask before touching anyone if meeting community members in person. It’s easy, and the worst thing that happens is someone says no! That includes hugging—you might not know that it makes some people uncomfortable, but it does, so please ask first.
• Look out for other participants. Alert admins if you notice violations of this Code of Conduct, even if they seem inconsequential.
• Refrain from using Queer Design Club as a dating site.
  

Privacy

Respecting each other’s privacy is essential to a healthy, trusting community.

• Please keep what’s said in Queer Design Club confidential.
• Don’t repeat or quote things said here without the affirmative consent of the speaker(s).
• Do not identify others as members of the community without their consent, as this may be a form of outing.
• Be aware that unsolicited direct messages may be perceived as an invasion of privacy, especially if you have not interacted with someone in public spaces. Get consent in a public channel to direct message someone before doing so.

Please be mindful that things you say here may at some point become public. We cannot prevent people from screencapping or otherwise logging this slack. We also can’t guarantee that every member’s login credentials and logged-in devices are secure. Files uploaded here can be downloaded by anyone with a login. Please exercise caution and refrain from sharing sensitive information that could harm you or others if it became public.

Because this is a free slack account, we have restricted scrollback, but Slack—the company—retains complete logs of all channels and direct messages back to the creation of Queer Design Club. Slack is a U.S. company and therefore subject to subpoenas from U.S. courts. Our logs may be subject to subpoena and could become public as part of legal proceedings. By joining our community, you are opting in to these conditions.

Unacceptable Behavior

Unacceptable behaviors include: intimidating, harassing, abusive, discriminatory, intentional misgendering, derogatory or demeaning speech or actions by any participant in our community online, whether in public channels or private messages, as well as in interactions between community members on other platforms or offline.

Harassment includes:

• Harmful or prejudicial verbal or written comments related to:
  • Gender
  • Gender identity and expression
  • Sexual orientation
  • Disability
  • Mental illness
  • Neurodiversity
  • Physical appearance
  • Body size
  • Age
  • Race
  • National origin
  • Ethnic origin
  • Nationality
  • Immigration status
  • Language
  • Religion or lack thereof
  • Or other identity marker.
• This includes anti-Indigenous/Nativeness and anti-Blackness.
• Sending direct solicitation for money or other types of support to members via DM on Slack or other social platforms. Please keep requests for support to #help-and-requests.
• Spamming channels with frequent self-promotional content. The community is here to support each other, but please avoid repeatedly posting the same thing or overwhelming channels with your content.
• Questioning or challenging someone’s stated self-identity or chosen labels, even if they conflict with your own views. (For example, discussions about bi vs. pan, trans vs trans*, or whether grey/demisexual people are asexual, even if well-intentioned.)
• Making general statements about groups you do not belong to.
• Unwelcome comments regarding a person’s lifestyle choices and practices, including those related to food, health, parenting, relationships, drugs, political affiliations and employment.
• Trolling, i.e. sustained disruption of conversations, talks or other events.
• Nonconsensual photography or recording at in-person events.
• Gratuitous or off-topic sexual images, language, or behaviour in spaces where they’re not appropriate such as public channels or in slides at in-person events.
• Deliberate intimidation, stalking or following.
• Non-consensual physical contact and/or unwelcome sexual attention.
• Microaggressions, i.e. small, subtle, often subconscious actions that marginalize people from oppressed groups.
• Minimizing other people’s experiences.
• No incitement of violence towards any individual, including encouraging a person to commit suicide or to engage in self-harm
• Deliberate “outing” of any aspect of a person’s identity without their consent except as necessary to protect vulnerable people from intentional abuse.
• Publication of non-harassing private communication.
• Advocating for members to be banned, except in direct messages, or private discussion with admins.

Queer Design Club prioritizes marginalized people’s safety over privileged people’s comfort. The administrators will not act on complaints regarding:

• “Reverse”-isms, including “reverse racism,” “reverse sexism,” and “cisphobia”
• Reasonable communication of boundaries, such as “leave me alone,” “go away,” or “I’m not discussing this with you.”
• Communicating in a “tone” you don’t find congenial
• Criticizing racist, sexist, cissexist, or otherwise oppressive behavior or assumptions

The examples listed above are not against the Code of Conduct.

Consequences of Unacceptable Behavior

Unacceptable behavior from any community member, including sponsors and those with decision-making authority, will not be tolerated. Anyone asked to stop unacceptable behavior is expected to stop immediately.

If a community member engages in unacceptable behavior, the community organizers may take any action they deem appropriate, up to and including a temporary ban or permanent expulsion from the community without warning (and without refund in the case of a paid event). Queer Design Club admins may choose to identify violators of our policies against abuse and harassment as a harasser to other Queer Design Club members or the general public. We may also choose to share that harassing or abusive content within or outside of the Slack channel if we feel it is best for the safety of the community.

The intention of your behavior is not as important as the impact. We have no discussion about how your behaviour was meant. What we care about is how it makes our participants feel. Please just respect that if one of the participants is hurt by your behaviour, it is on you to change it or leave.

If you feel you have been falsely or unfairly accused of violating this Code of Conduct, you should notify one of the admins via direct message with a concise description of your grievance. Your grievance will be handled in accordance with our existing governing policies.

When Something Happens

If you see a Code of Conduct violation, follow these steps:

• Let the person know that what they did is not appropriate and ask them to stop and/or edit their message(s).
• That person should immediately stop the behavior and correct the issue.
• If this doesn’t happen, or if you’re uncomfortable speaking up, contact admins.
• As soon as available, an admin will join, identify themselves, and take further action (see below), starting with a warning, then temporary deactivation, then long-term deactivation.
• When reporting, please include any relevant details, links, screenshots, context, or other information that may be used to better understand and resolve the situation.
• The Admin team will prioritize the well-being and comfort of those affected negatively by the violation over the comfort of the violator.

If you are being harassed by a member of Queer Design Club, notice that someone else is being harassed, or have any other concerns, please contact the administrators by typing /admin <your message> in Slack, or contact an admin directly via DM. 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 Queer Design Club spaces, but if you are being harassed by a member of Queer Design Club outside our spaces, we still want to know about it. We will take all good-faith reports of harassment by Queer Design Club members seriously. This includes harassment outside our spaces and harassment that took place at any point in time. We reserve the right to exclude people from Queer Design Club based on their past behavior, including behavior outside Queer Design Club spaces and behavior towards people who are not in Queer Design Club.

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. We will not name harassment victims without their affirmative consent.

Thanks and Attribution

This code of conduct is adapted from several sources including Annalee Flower Horne’s Sample Slack Code of Conduct—which is in turn based on Geek Feminism’s Community Anti-Harassment Policy—the LGBTQ in Technology Slack, and Queer code.

We have adapted these codes of conduct for our own use under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License.

Please build on this for your own purposes, and suggest improvements. If you use it, we’d love to know!