We want everyone to feel welcome and safe in the Email Geeks community regardless of gender, gender identity and expression, age, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, ethnicity, religious beliefs, political stance, or technology choices.
Accordingly, we will not tolerate harassment of our members in any form; not on Slack, not on Twitter or other online channels, and not in person at email industry events or otherwise.
Harassment includes invasion of personal space, exclusionary jokes and comments, and sexual language and imagery — but this list is non-exhaustive. If you make anyone feel uncomfortable or unwelcome, you will be asked to leave. If someone feels harassed or excluded by your words or actions, those words or actions constitute harassment or exclusion. Your intent is not a factor.
All Email Geeks Slack participants are accountable for their own behaviour. If you’ve behaved badly elsewhere, that may count against you here because of the effect it has on other members.
Posting messages to provoke controversy or emotional response — whether for amusement or another motivation — will not be tolerated. Our #random channel is off-topic by design, but should remain positive and not polarising.
All members must adhere to the Chatham House Rule:
When a meeting, or part thereof, is held under the Chatham House Rule, participants are free to use the information received, but neither the identity nor the affiliation of the speaker(s), nor that of any other participant, may be revealed.
What this means in practice is that no identifying personal or company information leaves the Slack group — not for an article, not for sales, nor any other reason. (The sole exception is if you ask for and receive explicit permission from each person involved.) While our community is semi-public, this rule allows our members to share a little more freely and openly.
If you're hosting a conference or webinar or similar, you're welcome to post once per event about it in #email-events, but please refrain from repeated posts about the same event unless asked specific follow-up questions.
As we are an industry-focused community, many of our members have a strong business interest behind their participation. This is okay as long as you are transparent about your affiliations and motives. Our members are often supportive of business-related or promotional messages if the people behind them are also general contributors to the community.
However, to protect both our members’ experiences and our community’s reputation, we do have a few rules:
- Don’t send unsolicited direct messages for sales, marketing, research, or other business purposes
- DM as you’d email: without spamming
- If there’s a message you want to send to multiple people, find the most appropriate channel and post there instead
- Don’t post about a company, product, or service to which you have an undisclosed affiliation or business relationship
- For a custom emoji of your company’s logo to use as your “Slack status”, please message admin Dylan Smith
- Don’t post undisclosed referral links
- Referrals are fine as long as you make it clear what people are clicking
- Don’t spam our community with links or content
- Share to be helpful, not promotional; Email Geeks is not a marketing channel
- Factors like not participating aside from posting links or including tracking parameters on URLs may lead to messages or users being removed
- Anyone may post promotional messages and links in #vendor-promo
- Don’t respond to a post unthreaded
- Threads allow the community to be much easier to navigate for those who are new or simply pop in from time to time. So if you are looking to respond to a post, leave your response in a thread. Very few exceptions to this rule exist; you’ll know them when you see them
- Don’t be repetitive
- Posting the same question or information in multiple channels causes separate conversations to occur instead of one holistic discussion. Keep it in one place. Don’t post unconstructive criticism
- Conversation around the work, tools, and companies of members and non-members is fine, but keep it constructive and refrain from piling on; you never know who is reading
- Consider taking your criticism to the relevant person or company privately
- Don’t distribute material without authorisation
- This includes links, text, and images of content like reports, webinars, and white papers that may be paid, exclusive to members of an organisation, or behind an email signup
- Don’t impersonate other people
- Ill-intended or not, changing your name and/or photo to replicate someone else’s likeness can be confusing for others
- Don’t scrape or automate anything to do with our member list or messages for any reason, personal or professional
- We’re a community, not a database
- Don’t “brigade” to or from our community (send people to comment/vote/etc. for a particular interest)
- Don’t ask for a channel for your company
- To reiterate an above point, Email Geeks is not a marketing channel; existing #vendor- channels have been created to bring users together and may or may not include employee representatives
- Vendors are strongly encouraged to not use our platform (channels or DMs) for customer communication or support
- The admin team will identify needs for new channels as conversation around topics becomes overwhelming in existing channels; this is the only way new channels will be created
- Existing #vendor- channels will be removed as they become insufficiently active
- Don’t ask about cold email (spam)
- This is a permissed-based marketing group
- Questions about, promotion for, and job relating to cold email will be removed — but probably not before other members let you know how they feel about it
You’re able to post questions anonymously to appropriate channels, but please keep in mind that the admin team can see all authors’ names. Admins commit to keeping authors’ identities anonymous.
If you feel that someone has violated this code of conduct or has otherwise acted inappropriately, please contact a member of the admin team as soon as possible. The admin team currently consists of Dylan Smith, Jacques Corby-Tuech, Tiffani Davidson, and Nout Boctor-Smith.
All messages and conversations are assumed to be sent in confidence unless otherwise agreed, though they can and will be discussed privately by the admin team. If an incident warrants transparency in public community channels, the reporting member has a right to anonymity unless waived.
If a participant engages in behavior that violates this code of conduct, the admin team may take any action they deem appropriate, including warning the offender or removing them from the group.
The first draft of this document was written by Dylan Smith, drawing on a number of sources and input from members of the Email Geeks Slack community. While it contains some information that is uncontroversial and unlikely to become quickly outdated, it is intended to be a living document.
You can see past versions of the document — along with dates and descriptions of changes — by viewing the commit history on GitHub.
Contributions and discussion about this document are very welcome. You can participate in a few different ways:
- By privately contacting a member of the admin team
- By opening an issue or a pull request in this repository
- By raising a discussion in the Slack community itself
Suggestions may be discussed by admins and members of the community before being incorporated into this document.