Code of Conduct

  1. Expected Behavior
  2. Privacy
  3. Unacceptable Behavior
  4. Consequences of Unacceptable Behavior
  5. When Something Happens
  6. Thanks and Attribution

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.

This Code of Conduct outlines our expectations for all those who participate in our community, as well as the consequences for unacceptable behavior. The admins have created this Slack, but it is the community that will turn it into a safe and supportive space for everyone.

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).

Privacy

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

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:

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

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:

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!