Hello, SiRAnauts new and old! Welcome to the SiRA Membership Slack quick-start guide 🙂
SiRA Slack is a growing community! As SiRA Slack continues to grow, it can be harder to figure out where to get started. This quick-start guide is intended to give you that starting point to exploring and participating in this community.
And please be assured that we do want you - yes, you! - to participate. You are not too junior, or too new, or not leader-y enough to contribute. Our community benefits from being able to discuss and learn from all of our perspectives and experiences, and it's one of the great things about being in SiRA Slack.
That being said - active participation is not mandatory! We know that some folks prefer to hang back and take it all in, and people who choose to be more passive participants are still welcome here.
Please make sure you read and understand the SiRA Slack Code of Conduct. We respect it and take it quite seriously!
This community is especially sensitive to appropriate interactions around commercial activity. The CoC has a detailed section around these expectations that you should read, but the tl;dr is that commercial behavior is strictly limited to a select few channels, and there is an especially low tolerance for community members who choose to repeatedly ignore these CoC guidelines.
Our CoC has specific guidelines around unsolicited DMs and generally leans toward any kind of unsolicited DM being a breach of the CoC. If you're OK with people reaching out to you via DMs, you may want to mention it in your profile.
This is a big place, and it can feel intimidating. On the surface, SiRA Membership Slack looks like a group of high-performing leaders with extensive experience and a wide range of expertise. And that's true - but that's not all we are. We are humans with strengths and weaknesses. Our community is a fabric of many individuals from different backgrounds, companies, countries, and working cultures. We each bring different perspectives to the discussion - and so can you.
We know what imposter syndrome is. Many of us experience it regularly in some form, and you may well feel it too upon joining. Finding yourself amongst a self-selecting group of leaders, often in high profile roles, you can suddenly feel smaller than you did before. We strongly encourage you to push past this. Start contributing. Find your own voice, share your own insights, and ask questions where you want to learn. We welcome you and hope you will quickly find it rewarding to engage with us.
We treat risk analysis as a human quality, not just a job title. We make mistakes and learn from each other. We support and encourage each other. We're a community.
Some channels have specific guidance on what's considered on-topic for discussion - if so, that information is typically in the channel topic and/or description, so have a look there before posting.
Many channels also have pinned items - links and resources that people have considered useful or important enough to bookmark for easy look-up later.
SiRA Membership Slack has many (many) channels. We could not hope to describe all of them here, but this should help give you a starting point for being here.
#sira-newbies: Not sure which channel is the best place for your question or post? Ask for directions here.#sira-*: Channels with thesira-prefix are related to operating and participating in SiRA Slack, such as#sira-public,#sira-newbiesand#sira-quotewall.#random: Channel for your random thoughts.#jobs: Job postings and requests for referrals for job-seekers.
Slackbot custom responses are trigger words or trigger phrases that cause an auto-reply from Slackbot. Discussions about Slackbot responses take place in #coc.
The SiRA Membership Slack has a Slackbot that automatically flags non-inclusive words and phrases and makes alternate suggestions.
Have you been on the receiving end of this Slackbot for using some particular term? Don't feel bad - many of us have too! It's not there to draw attention to you personally - it's simply a mechanism we use to gently shape the whole community towards inclusive language and set some norms around how we communicate. Please just take it as intended: a friendly prompt to consider refining how you express yourself.
In partnership with Better Allies, the Rands Leadership Slack decided to share their inclusive language Slackbot rules so that administrators of other Slack communities can copy or modify them. We are using these same rules in the SiRA Membership Slack as well.
For simple instructions on how to download the rules and customize a Slack workspace, please refer to this page.