Community Guidelines

Community Guidelines

Thanks for stopping by to read these guidelines. We wrote these in order to come together and agree upon a set of community values so that we can grow together as a team, have meaningful discussions about Machine Learning and still allow room for having loads of fun.

These are all things we strongly believe in and hope you do too.

We are a community of learners

• If someone asks for help, teach them to fish. The person should have already watched the video, and Googled a bit, so assume they’ve tried and are stuck. You can start by saying, “tell me what you do understand, and at what part you’re getting stuck.” Then work from there
• Please do not give out code related to projects as this violates Udacity's honor code.

Slack Etiquette

• If you have a question, ask! The caveat is that you should have made some effort to research your problem before asking for help.
• When you want to ask someone a specific question, use the @member method to ask the person a direct question in the appropriate channel. We prefer members to use @member method vs direct messaging because this encourages community participation. Community takes public participation, so please consider braving the waters, we won’t bite!
• Direct Messaging should only be used for private information or purely personal conversation.
• Do not use the @channel tag. It notifies everyone, and it’s never appropriate. Unfortunately we cannot disable this
• Using @here is totally ok, as long as you have a relevant announcement or important question. Please use good judgement, @here does notify people who are currently signed into slack
• Please keep discussions in the correct channels. This may seem a little strange at first, having two simultaneous conversations with the same people in two separate channels, but the reality is that it helps people’s ideas be heard. The chat moves quickly, if we have multiple topics in one channel, it’s very difficult to discuss anything
• If you are discussing something, and someone suggests you move to one of the other channels, it’s probably a good idea, don't worry most of the time we all follow each other into other channels.
• Please refrain from using any swear or cuss words.

A few things to consider

• Everyone in the MLND comes from different backgrounds, education, family (married, kids, single, student, retired), so please don’t make assumptions about others and be kind and respectful to everyone
• Disagreeing is OK! And in fact it’s encouraged. We want productive discussions so we can all learn and get different perspectives. Just be polite and respectful
• Should you at any time use the term optimize or any of it's variants, be sure to enclose it in asterisks*, so it is bolded. You'll feel like part of the gang in no time!
• Should the need arise (as it so often does) to say something sarcastic, use official sarcasm punctuation ~. for dry sarcasm. ~! for enthusiastic sarcasm. And ~? for sarcastic/rhetorical questions

Channels

• We have a fair amount of channels. Join the ones you are interested in. Every channel has a purpose and description. If you think we need a new channel, suggest it in #general; if there is a good response, you should request it in #to_admin
• #ask_udacity is for any curious questions you have for Udacity staff, but please keep in mind that they are here almost purely as observers, questions requiring official response should be directed to either the forums or [email protected]
• We do not have channels specific to the projects! This is on purpose. The idea is that we don’t want to encourage “how do I do x, y or z”, we prefer to talk about theory, ideas and techniques. It is totally OK to ask project specific questions in appropriate theory channels (supervised, unsupervised, reinforcement learning), we just don’t want to focus solely on the projects in our conversations
• There is a #beginners channel, we encourage everyone to participate there, but the conversation should be initiated by those with questions
• If you ask a question in a channel but aren’t getting a response, make sure that there are people in the channel. It’s ok to @mention someone if you’d like to ask them to the join the channel to help with the discussion (@mention will automatically invite them into the channel). If you are still stuck and not getting help, try #general, but be prepared for others to tell you “sorry, I don’t have time”, or “I don’t know”

Channel List

• #Algorithms
  • This channel is for discussion of algorithms, how they work, what they do, and when to use them
• #CodeBugs
  • When your code doesn't work and you can't figure out why, ask it here
• #DataWrangling
  • Once you get to your capstone you'll have to clean and arrange your data, this channel is for all such questions and information
• #MLReads
  • This channel is full of little readable goodies about Machine Learning, consisting of articles, books, and some courses
• #Careers
  • Interviews, resumes, and job oppurtunities, post about it here
• #Improve_MLND
  • This channel is monitored by the course managers, if there's something that needs improvement in the MLND, discuss it here, we're good listeners
• #Ideas
  • Just had that idea that will change the world? Shoot a message into this channel and discuss away
• #Reinforcement-Learning
  • Discussion about reinforcement learning, including, but not limited to, Project 4
• #To_Admins
  • Questions comments and concerns, addressed to the student run team slack
• #To_Udacity
  • To ask specific questions about the MLND program or questions about Udacity. This channel should not be used for content or project-related discussion.

BE NICE! Really.