alphalist.cto ("alphalist") is an online community network of CTOs. While many of the channels are not specifically focused on leadership, all participants in this community are expected to act like leaders and required to comply with the following Code of Conduct. Administrators will enforce this code throughout the alphalist Slack.

Some αlphalist 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.

 Any violations will be dealt with seriously and may include being expelled and banned from events or online spaces without a refund. This is to protect the safety of our community.

Rules

Respect

The αlphalist CTO Community is a networking for connecting top CTOs. We recognize and celebrate the creativity and collaboration of our independent members and the diversity of skills, talents, experiences, cultures, and opinions that they bring to your community. The αlphalist CTO Community is an inclusive environment, based on treating all individuals respectfully, regardless of gender or gender identity (including transgender status), sexual orientation, age, disability, nationality, ethnicity, religion (or lack thereof), political affiliation, or career path.

We value respectful behavior above individual opinions.

Respectful behavior includes but is not limited to:

• Be considerate, kind, constructive, and helpful.
• Avoid demeaning, discriminatory, harassing, hateful, or physically threatening behavior, speech, and imagery.
• If you’re not sure, ask someone instead of assuming. No, really. Just ask the Administrators. We’d rather hear from you than hear about something you said or did after the fact, and we are here to help.
• Don’t be a bystander, be a leader. Role model respectful behaviour, but also help to address disrespect when you see it.

Disrespectful behavior outside this community by active members may be considered a violation of this code of conduct at the discretion of the Administrators.

Zero Tolerance to Harassment

αlphalist is dedicated to providing a harassment-free experience for everyone. We do not tolerate harassment of participants in any form.

WE ARE DIVERSITY ADVOCATES.

We have all experienced just how great diversity in teams is. We believe that we should cultivate our personal distinctiveness and occasionally be a little eccentric. We like engaging in discourse and appreciate varying opinions. Arguing is cool as long as it stays on subject and does not get personal.

We strive for teams with different characters, styles, preferences, genders and races. And yes, gender-wise this group is unfortunately not of ideal composition yet. Please help us change that!

-alphalist Manifesto

Harassment includes:

• Offensive comments related to gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, mental illness, neuro(a)typicality, physical appearance, body size, age, 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 vulnerable people from intentional abuse.
• Publication of non-harassing private communication.

αlphalist prioritizes marginalized people’s safety over privileged people’s comfort. αlphalist team reserves the right not to act on complaints regarding:

• ‘Reverse’ -isms, including ‘reverse racism,’ ‘reverse sexism,’ and ‘cisphobia’
• Reasonable communication of boundaries, such as “leave me alone,” “go away,” or “I’m not discussing this with you.”
• Communicating in a ‘tone’ you don’t find congenial
• Criticizing racist, sexist, cissexist, or otherwise oppressive behavior or assumptions

Reporting

If you are being harassed by a member of αlphalist, notice that someone else is being harassed, or have any other concerns, please contact the αlphalist team at [email protected]. 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 αlphalist spaces, but if you are being harassed by a member of αlphalist outside our spaces, we still want to know about it. We will take all good-faith reports of harassment by αlphalist members, especially by the αlphalist organisers , 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 αlphalist based on their past behavior, including behavior outside alphalist spaces and behavior towards people who are not in αlphalist.

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. 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 ofαlphalist members or the general public. We will not name harassment victims without their affirmative consent.

Privacy

This community is not a public space. However, no one has signed an non-disclosure agreement (“NDA”) to participate, and you should not presume anything you say here will remain private, so act accordingly. Protect IP and legally-protected information.

If you want to publicly disclose anything discussed here in a public channel, use the Chatham House Rule as the guideline (“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”).

For attribution of specific content found on this Slack on public channels, we ask that you ask the originator of the content for permission. If you don’t receive consent in a reasonable period of time, we ask that you credit the “αlphalist CTO Community.”

Sharing of content from private channels is discouraged.

Read the Room

This is large community with a great many different humans populating hundreds of channels. Different channels have organically developed different personalities. We suggest that before posting in a channel with hundreds of members that you take the time read the room. Specifically:

• Read the last couple days of messages.
• Examine the channel topic for helpful tips.
• Click on the channel details and read the about section, get a sense for how many members are present, and what messages have already been pinned and what files have been shared.

Posting the same message to multiple channels is spamming. Don't spam.

Direct Message Etiquette

A direct message (“DM”) is a private message to one or more other members. Sending a DM to another member who you don’t know might be jarring for the receiver. Prior to sending a DM to member you’ve never contacted, consider the following:

• Will it be obvious to the other member why I am privately contacting them? If not, should I provide context such as a public post?
• Could this message be considered unsolicited spam? If so, should you be sending it?

A Collaborative 'No Selling' Environment

This is not a place for obvious commercial activities such as recruiting, lead generation, marketing, and other solicitation, except in channels dedicated to that purpose. If you join this community simply to take value rather than contribute, the community will quickly notice and react.

While obvious commercial behavior is easy to identify, non-obvious commercial behavior is a grey area. In general, if you are wondering if a post is commercial, our guidelines are that you that you contact an administrator and hear their thoughts. 

Approved Commercial Channels

On-top and relevant commercial activity is allowed in these channels:

• #product-deals
• #product-feedback
• #interesting-content
• #hr

Some geographically-focused channels have a higher tolerance for specific kinds of commercial activity focused on events based in that region. Again, read the room. If you'd like to request approval for a channel to be listed as commercial, please contact the Adminstrators.

In channels where commercial activity is allowed, it is just as unwelcome to post an unrelated commercial offering as it is to post in non-commercial channels.

Commercial requests via direct messages (“DM”) without prior and/or obvious consent from the receiver are prohibited.

Surveys

We’ve received many requests to run surveys in specific channels. Members interested in surveying a channel must clearly state in the channel they intend to survey:

1. The goal of the survey
2. How the data will be used
3. When and how the results will be shared with the channel

Resolve Peacefully

As a technical leadership community, we believe peer-to-peer discussions, feedback, and corrections can help build a stronger, safer, more informed, and more welcoming community.

If you see someone violating any part of this Code of Conduct, we urge you to respectfully dissuade them from such behavior using this document if necessary. Expect that others in the community wish to help keep the community respectful, and welcome your input in doing so.

If you experience disrespectful behavior toward yourself or anyone else and feel in any way unable or unwilling to respond or resolve it respectfully (for any reason), please immediately bring it to the attention of an Administrator. We want to hear from you about anything that you feel is disrespectful, threatening, or just something that could make someone feel distressed in any way. We will listen and work to resolve the matter with your help.

Should you catch yourself behaving disrespectfully, or be confronted as such, listen intently, own up to your words and actions, and apologize accordingly. No one is perfect, and even well-intentioned people make mistakes. What matters is how you handle them and that you avoid repeating them in the future. We are here to learn.

Consequences

If you are unable to resolve a situation peacefully, please contact an administrator on next steps.

If the Administrators determine that a human is violating any part of this Code of Conduct, the Administrators may take any action they deem appropriate within this Slack team, up to and including expulsion and exclusion from the αlphalist CTO Community.

As Administrators, we will seek to resolve conflicts peacefully and in a manner that is positive for the community. We can’t foresee every situation, and thus if in the Administrator's judgment the best thing to do is to ask a disrespectful individual to leave, we will do so.

Administrators

The Administrator(s) of alphalist CTO Slack as of December 2021:

• @Tobias Schlottke 
• @Chaya Trevor
• @Martin Brüggemann

You can contact them directly.

Administrator Information Access

As part of the role, Administrators have information not available to all users. This information includes:

• Email addresses provided by a member as part of our sign-up process.
• Information contained within member requests to join the community. This might include email, name, and occupation.
• Information submitted via member interviews and event RSVP
• Access log information provided by the Slack administrator interface. This includes name, login times, login device, and IP.

Administrators do not have access to private channels unless they are a member of that channel.

As part of Code of Conduct investigations, Administrators may choose to access this information. Administrators may also request information from private channels from current channel members to investigate a Code of Conduction violation.

Administrators may use the above information as part of a Code of Conduct investigation. Usage of this information unrelated to administrator work is forbidden and will be treated as a Code of Conduct violation.

Thanks for Being Here

Thank you to every αlphalist CTO Community community member for helping to make our home the respectful and inclusive community that it is.

This code of conduct is primarily based on the Code of Conduct from the Rand Leadership Slack which in turn is based on the Code of Conduct of the IndieWebCamp. Both of which were released under the CC0 public domain license.

Our anti-harassment policy is based on the example policy provided by the Geek Feminism wiki.

v1.0.1, 2021-12-05