Social Rules

As the EaaSI community grows, increasingly into potentially public spaces such as the Community Forum, the project team recognizes to need to protect community members and provide a welcoming and inclusive space. We do not tolerate harassment in any form and will take action to remove discriminatory language and imagery, harassing behavior, and/or offenders from this site.

As the EaaSI program of work explores a permanent home, professional affiliation and/or governance structure, we will investigate how best to create and enforce a transparent Code of Conduct applicable across EaaSI spaces (i.e. including the Community Forum, in-person workshops or events, email, etc) with community participation and oversight - in accordance with the stated Values in our Program Charter.

In the meantime, please follow these Social Rules for discussion on the Community Forum. This page has been liberally informed and guided by:

This is a Place for Public Discussion

Please treat this discussion forum with the same respect you would your workplace or a public park. We, too, are a shared community resource — a place to share skills, knowledge and interests through ongoing conversation.

Improve the Discussion

Help us make this a great place for discussion by always working to improve the discussion in some way, however small. The topics discussed here matter to us, and we want you to act as if they matter to you, too. Be respectful of the topics and the people discussing them, even if you disagree with some of what is being said. One way to improve the discussion is by discovering ones that are already happening!

Be Agreeable, Even When You Disagree

You may wish to respond to something by disagreeing with it. That’s fine. But remember to criticize ideas, not people. Please avoid:

  • Name-calling
  • Ad hominem attacks
  • Responding to a post’s tone instead of its actual content
  • Knee-jerk contradiction

Your Participation Counts

The conversations we have here set the tone for every new arrival. Help us influence the future of this community by choosing to engage in discussions that make this forum an interesting place to be.

Discourse provides tools that enable the community to collectively identify the best (and worst) contributions: bookmarks, likes, flags, replies, marked solutions, and so forth. Use these tools to improve your own experience, and everyone else’s, too.

If You See a Problem, Flag It

The EaaSI program team are all granted Moderator authority. The User Support Lead is generally responsible for this forum, with assistance from the User and Technical Support and Community & Outreach working groups. Though Discourse allows for the most consistent and reliable community members to gain moderation authority over time, we have disabled that feature for now, until further discussion can be had with the community regarding their role in facilitating this Forum.

When you see bad behavior, please flag it. If enough flags accrue, action will be taken, either automatically or by moderator intervention.

In order to maintain our community, moderators reserve the right to remove any content and any user account for any reason at any time. Moderators do not preview new posts; the moderators and site operators take no responsibility for any content posted by the community.

Always Be Civil

  • Be civil. Don’t post anything that a reasonable person would consider offensive, abusive, or hate speech.
  • Keep it clean. Don’t post anything obscene or sexually explicit.
  • Respect each other. Don’t harass or grief anyone, impersonate people, or expose their private information.
  • Respect our forum. Don’t post spam or otherwise vandalize the forum.

These are not concrete terms with precise definitions, and the EaaSI team will interpret and enforce them according to their judgment - and again, in line with our stated Values.

This is a public forum, and search engines index these discussions. Keep the language, links, and images safe for family and friends.

Recurse Rules

The EaaSI team also encourages abiding by The Recurse Center’s four social rules:

  • No well-actuallys
  • No feigned surprise
  • No backseat driving
  • No subtle -isms

Check out their full page for a breakdown of each of these points. Like The Recurse Center, we expect these ones may be broken from time to time! These particular rules are not intended to address harassment or discrimination and the EaaSI team will not respond with punishment. They just help us all to make this a friendly, intellectual and inclusive environment.

Keep It Tidy

Make the effort to put things in the right place, so that we can spend more time discussing and less cleaning up. So:

  • Don’t cross-post the same thought or request in multiple topics or categories.
  • Don’t post no-content replies.
  • Don’t divert a topic by changing it midstream.
  • Don’t sign your posts — every post has your profile information attached to it.

Rather than posting “+1” or “Agreed”, use the Like button. Rather than taking an existing topic in a radically different direction, use Reply as a Linked Topic.

Powered by You

This site is operated by your friendly local staff and you, the community. If you have any further questions about how things should work here, open a new topic in the site feedback category and let’s discuss! If there’s a critical or urgent issue that can’t be handled by a meta topic or flag, contact us via the staff page.

Terms of Service

The EaaSI Community Forum runs on Discourse’s hosted service. Please consult their Terms of Service describing your (and our) behavior and rights related to content, privacy, and laws. To use this service, you must agree to abide by the TOS.