This policy is a "living" document, and subject to refinement and expansion in the future.
Spec is dedicated to providing a harassment-free experience for everyone, regardless of gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, or religion. We do not tolerate harassment of participants in any form.
This code of conduct applies to all Spec-sponsored spaces, including our Spectrum community, open-source projects, and other spaces that Spec hosts, both online and off. Anyone who violates this code of conduct may be sanctioned or expelled from these spaces at the discretion of the Spec hosts.
Some Spec-sponsored spaces may have additional rules in place, which will be made clearly available to participants. Participants are responsible for knowing and abiding by these rules.
Harassment includes:
- Offensive comments related to gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, mental illness, neuro(a)typicality, physical appearance, body size, race, or religion
- Unwelcome comments regarding a person’s lifestyle choices and practices, including those related to food, health, parenting, drugs, and employment.
- Deliberate misgendering or use of ‘dead’ or rejected names
- Gratuitous or off-topic sexual images or behaviour in spaces where they’re not appropriate
- Physical contact and simulated physical contact (eg, textual descriptions like “hug” or “backrub”) without consent or after a request to stop.
- Threats of violence
- Incitement of violence towards any individual, including encouraging a person to commit suicide or to engage in self-harm
- Deliberate intimidation
- Stalking or following
- Harassing photography or recording, including logging online activity for harassment purposes
- Sustained disruption of discussion
- Unwelcome sexual attention
- Pattern of inappropriate social contact, such as requesting/assuming inappropriate levels of intimacy with others
- Continued one-on-one communication after requests to cease
- Deliberate “outing” of any aspect of a person’s identity without their consent except as necessary to protect other Spec community members or other vulnerable people from intentional abuse
- Publication of non-harassing private communication
If you are being harassed by a member of the Spec community, notice that someone else is being harassed, or have any other concerns, please contact one of the Spec hosts in Slack. 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 Spec-sponsored spaces, but if you are being harassed by a member of the Spec community outside our spaces, we still want to know about it. We will take all good-faith reports of harassment by Spec community members seriously. This includes harassment outside our spaces and harassment that took place at any point in time. The abuse team reserves the right to exclude people from the Spec community based on their past behavior, including behavior outside Spec spaces and behavior towards people who are not in the Spec community.
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. The Spec hosts are not here to explain power differentials or other basic social justice concepts to you. Reports intended to silence legitimate criticism may be deleted without response.
We will respect confidentiality requests for the purpose of protecting victims of abuse. At our discretion, we may publicly name a person about whom we’ve received harassment complaints, or privately warn third parties about them, if we believe that doing so will increase the safety of Spec members or the general public. We will not name harassment victims without their affirmative consent.
Participants asked to stop any harassing behavior are expected to comply immediately.
If a participant engages in harassing behavior, the Spec hosts may take any action they deem appropriate, up to and including expulsion from all Spec spaces and identification of the participant as a harasser to other Spec community members or the general public.
If you would like to adopt a policy similar to this one in your community, we recommend looking at Geek Feminism's community anti-harassment resources, including a freely reusable and modifiable policy.