The Six Septembers Reading Group is dedicated to providing a harassment-free online community experience for everyone regardless of digital humanities experience, employment, technical skills, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, age, or religion. We do not tolerate harassment of members in any form. Harassment and other code of conduct violations reduce the value of our community for everyone, regardless of the intent behind these violations. Community members violating these rules may be banned from this group at the discretion of the moderators. The rest of this code of conduct document defines these statements in more detail.
Anyone with a background in the humanities who has an interest in improving their knowledge of mathematics is invited to join us. Join the Six SEptembers Slack via https://tinyurl.com/6septembers-slack. Make sure to check your spam folder if you don’t receive an email with a link to start using the Slack within ten minutes after you submit the form, then email qad@stanford.edu; a few people have encountered the automatic form not sending them an invitation email for some reason. You’re automatically accepted (as long as you haven’t previously broken the Six Septembers slack code of conduct), so if you fail to recieve an invitation after filling out the https://tinyurl.com/6septembers-slack form, it’s just a technical error.
The Six Septembers Slack channels are organized by chapter, one channel per chapter, to help organize the discussion.
This code of conduct is an evolving document that changes following discussion on the Six Septembers Slack’s #meta channel. It is based on the work of many DH Slack members, and was created based on their code of conduct as of June 2019.
The Six Septembers Slack is dedicated to providing a harassment-free online community experience for everyone regardless of digital humanities experience, employment, technical skills, gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, age, or religion. We do not tolerate harassment of DH Slack team members in any form. Sexual language and imagery is not appropriate for this Slack. Dismissive or belittling behavior (e.g. answering questions with links to Let Me Google That For You) is not allowed.
Harassment and other code of conduct violations reduce the value of our community for everyone, regardless of the intent behind these violations. Community members violating these rules may be banned from this Slack at the discretion of the moderators.
Note that the Six Septembers Slack is an informal community. It is not sponsored by any institution and is run/moderated by volunteers. Users with the ability to moderate abuse/spam/etc. (“admins”) do not regularly check all channels for problems. As Six Septembers Slack members we’ll do our best to make the community safe and inviting, but please bring any issues to an admin’s attention (you can always email qad@stanford.edu or check the list of current admins pinned to the #moderation channel).
If someone makes you or anyone else feel unsafe or unwelcome, please report it as soon as possible to Quinn Dombrowski (via direct message or qad@stanford.edu). Your information will be kept anonymous and never shared unless you explicitly consent to its sharing. You won’t be asked to confront anyone and we won’t tell anyone who you are.
##Consequences
Participants asked to stop any harassing behavior are expected to comply immediately. Messages deleted by a moderator should not be reposted.
If a participant engages in harassing behavior, moderators may take any action they deem appropriate. Moderator responses may include deleting a Slack message (including replacing the message with information on why such messages are not allowed), DMing the participant to inform them of their code of conduct violation and requiring acknowledgement that a second violation will result in an immediate and permanent ban, immediate and permanent expulsion from the DH Slack, and identification of the participant as a harasser to other moderators, the DH Slack community, or the general public.
Note that invoking /giphy with terms that aren’t harassment can sometimes result in GIFs that perpetuate one of these forms of harassment. It isn’t your fault—just edit your message to remove the GIF (ask a mod if you need help).
The DH Slack prioritizes marginalized people’s safety over privileged people’s comfort. We will not act on complaints regarding:
Consider that your life experiences do not provide you with the best means to judge whether something is harassment to another person. For example, frequently harassed groups deal with regular oppressions throughout the day (microaggressions). Though each oppression may not seem like harassment to someone not regularly experiencing or aware of these oppressions, these instances absolutely are oppressions, constant reminders that society values you less, and such experiences in aggregate (including experiences that mean seem small in scope to an outsider) take a damaging toll.
Default toward believing and working to understand someone when they report harassment or discomfort. Civility is important to a good community. Is what you want to post actually worth the risk of making someone feel disrespected, demeaned, or of lesser value, or would the community be just as fine if you didn’t take that risk and didn’t post the message?
If you’re not sure whether something you want to say constitutes harassment, don’t guess, and don’t post the message and wait to see how it’s interpreted. Read through these guidelines again, then use the #moderation channel (or DM one of the moderators listed in the pinned list in the #moderation channel) to ask. This reduces the number of community members exposed to your message if indeed it does constitute harassment, showing care for community wellness.
If a moderator DMs you about something that is a code of conduct violation (or near to a violation), your explicitly acknowledging you understand the nature of the violation and will work to not do it again shows a willingness to participate in the community’s values. Not responding to a moderator message and/or reposting a deleted message shows a disregard of the extra effort the moderator is investing to help you participate in the community, and a lack of care about the community’s wellness; this behavior can result in banning from the DH Slack.
Consider not just the intent of your behavior, but that your behavior’s impact is just as important as your intent. Many people act with good intent (not actively trying to cause trouble), but intent does not effect whether actions oppress or harass.
It is not the duty of others to repeatedly educate you to not harass. There are a wealth of online resources for your use; try searching for particular forms of oppression plus “101” for resources aimed at an introductory audience (e.g. “Ableism 101”). Repeated inability to participate in the DH Slack without harassment is grounds for permanent banning.
There’s a #moderation channel on the DH Slack, where we can specifically discuss moderation policies as well as specific cases if they arise. There is a list pinned to #moderation with information on various ways you can report abuse and spam, and which users have admin privileges (i.e. who can moderate or help with abuse/harassment/spam/etc.).
The pinned #moderation admin list also contains information on how to become a Six Septembers Slack admin. Six Septembers Slack users already known to the Slack owner will be solicited to take on the admin role. Also, Six Septembers Slack users who ask to be an admin can be granted this role, if they have participated on the DH Slack for a couple months. Evidence of some sort of verifiable web presence elsewhere than the Six Septembers Slack can help us establish that you’re trustworthy, but we strongly respect people’s right to rename anonymous and revealing your identity is not a requirement for becoming an admin.
An admin is a Slack user who has been granted the “admin” role. Admin abilities include removing others from public and private channels, disabling a team member’s account, deleting others’ messages, mass-deleting messages, and granting the admin role to others (details on Slack roles here: https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/201314026-Roles-and-permissions-in-Slack)
Six Septembers Slack users with the admin role agree to the following:
Any admin can ask to have the admin role removed from their account at any time for any reason.
Currently, the Six Septembers Slack:
Although no one can access messages older than the most recent 10k via the Slack directly, users with admin privileges can export the entire Slack message archive (not just the most recent 10k messages) as a JSON file (this export does not include private group history or files, direct message history or files, edit and deletion logs). The JSON isn’t super-friendly to read, but I’ll bet a good number of DHers are familiar with transforming it into something easily human-readable, so please be aware that this is possible.
The email address used in your Slack profile will be visible to other DH Slack users.
Please also consider that messages on the DH Slack could be captured via screenshot or copy/paste by any DH Slack user. To allow conversational and research reuse of the DH Slack while respecting the privacy and IP of the DH Slack’s users, you must follow the requirements below for quoting or reuse of the DH Slack:
Because of how Slack is designed, the Six Septembers Slack currently has an owner (Quinn Dombrowski; qad@stanford.edu) as well as a variety of members who have been given the “admin” role so that they can moderate discussions if needed. Suggestions for improving this structure would be appreciated!
Suggestions for improving this Slack or this Code of Conduct are invited and welcomed; please share these in the #meta channel if you are comfortable doing so, or share them directly with Quinn Dombrowski (via direct message or qad@stanford.edu) if you prefer.
The Six Septembers Slack has adapted the DH Slack code of conduct, which itself altered the CC Zero Geek Feminism Wiki’s code of conduct template (http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Community_anti-harassment). That policy is based on the conference anti-harassment policy, and is the work of Annalee Flower Horne with assistance from Valerie Aurora, Alex Skud Bayley, Tim Chevalier, Mary Gardiner, and the Geek Feminism community. Both the DH Slack policy and the original Geek Feminism policy are licensed under the Creative Commons Zero license. They are public domain, no credit and no open licencing of your version is required.
Thank you to Amanda Visconti for putting together the DH Slack code of conduct, and everyone who shared thoughts on improving the DH Slack on the Slack, via email, or on Twitter, including DH Slack members Sam Abrams, Kristen Mapes, Matthew Lincoln, Ed Summers, Alan G. Pike, Liz Lorang, Hyperverses, timfinnegan, Jeremy Throne, Brandon Locke, Lincoln Mullen, Brian Croxall, Jeff Godin, and Micah Vandegrift, and others via Twitter and email.