This document outlines the core principles of the Indie Testing Community Slack. It augments our Code of Conduct and provides a central reference point for our community members and admins to understand what types of behaviour we want to encourage and discourage.
Nothing in this document is a hard and fast rule, but remember that our admin team (guided by the community as a whole) has the final say - if they tell you to stop a conversation or change your behaviour then you should listen to them, or risk being excluded from the Slack workspace.
The Indie Testing Community is, first and foremost, a place to share experiences and knowledge with our peers. It is not a social media/news feed, nor should it be an extension of any organisation’s marketing strategy.
We are not a helpdesk, and no one should adopt the role of an ‘expert’ who should be listened to above anyone else. Every user is free to give (or not give) their views and advice at any time, and equally no one should expect their posts to be taken as gospel.
All opinions about testing tools, approaches, processes etc. are welcome. Remember, what works well in your current context may not be suitable or realistic for others, and vice versa.
The Indie Testing Community is a safe space, but this doesn’t mean that no topic is off limits. If a user does not wish to discuss a subject any further, respect their wishes and disengage from the conversation. If you wish to leave a conversation, remember you can unfollow a thread at any time.
We welcome the presence of content creators, bloggers, tool vendors, recruiters, outsourcing agencies etc. in our Slack, but they should act as community members first. In other words, they are expected to represent themselves as individuals not organisations, and to ‘give’ more than they ‘take’. We have specific channels for promotion and advertising such as #jobs, #events, #blogs and #ads; please don’t post your own work outside of those channels unless invited by others to do so.
The Indie Testing Community is:
- a place to share knowledge and give/receive advice with fellow testers and tester-adjacent people.
- a safe space to discuss testing processes, approaches and tools without judgement or dismissal.
- a place to share our own and other people's content hosted on other platforms.
- a place for ‘off-topic’ discussions with like-minded peers, as long as you post in suitable channels such as #random, #recreational-gaming, #mental-health, #memes and #wordle-and-puzzles.
- a place where you can freely express your worries and frustrations, without being subjected to unwanted advice or problem-solving.
- an international and diverse community, with different cultural contexts and shared points of reference that may be different to our own.
- an inclusive community where all members should feel comfortable and welcome, regardless of their race, nationality, age, gender identity, sexuality, religion, disability, impairment, neurodiversity, relationship status, philosophical beliefs etc.
- a self-moderating community, where we trust our community members to express their boundaries where needed and for their peers to respect those boundaries without question.
The Indie Testing Community is not:
- a soapbox for users to promote the 'right' way of doing something.
- We believe in choosing tools and approaches based on the specific context each of us are working in.
- a helpdesk or support forum where a response is guaranteed.
- Community members offer their time and expertise voluntarily, and they should not be aggressively tagged or pulled into discussions that they have not already chosen to take part in.
- a debate club where members compete to establish the ‘correct’ solution.
- If someone disagrees with you and does not wish to discuss a topic further, respect their wishes and step away from the conversation.
- a social media or news feed, or a place to dump links to external content.
- When linking to news stories or other types of external content, think about how you could make it relevant or interesting to other community members.
- Furthermore, try to keep potentially-sensitive discussions such as politics and ‘current events’ inside threads, so that people who do not wish to discuss these topics are not overwhelmed.
- a platform for content creators and businesses to promote their work without genuine engagement with the community.
- If you are self-promoting without any attempt to generate a discussion or provide specific context for your links, we reserve the right to delete your posts.
- a free-for-all where anything and everything is up for discussion.
- Where necessary, our admins will step in to keep a conversation on track, delete rule-breaking posts or privately tell community members to stop/change their behaviour.
- a private space where all information posted will remain within the confines of the Slack.
- Although we expect our members not to share the content of other members’ posts without their permission, our Slack community is open-access. We cannot control what a rogue member might do with information posted here.
- As such, be careful when sharing anything in this Slack that you would not wish to become public, such as specific details about your life or the organisation(s) that you work for.
This is a living document - it will evolve and change over time as the community grows and develops. We know that not everyone will agree with all of these principles, but we believe that they are necessary for the overall health of the community and the ongoing happiness of its members. If you feel that a principle should be changed in some way, or that a new principle should be added, make a post in our #admin channel, or DM one our admins.
It is unlikely that any community member will be directly punished simply for falling foul of one of these principles, unless it’s clear that they had malicious intent when doing so. However any member who the admin team feels is not acting within the spirit of these principles may be spoken to privately and, in extreme cases, excluded from the Slack community. Our intention is always to engage constructively and find a solution that works for everyone, not to punish or criticise.
If you feel that another member is not abiding by these principles, please contact one of our admins via DM. As mentioned in our code of conduct, we reserve the right to reject any report we believe to have been made in bad faith.