mcrtech Slack Community

mcrtech operates under Chatham House Rule. You are free to use the information in mcrtech in other contexts. However, you should not disclose the identity or affiliation of any commenter in mcrtech without first getting their permission.

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

The mcrtech chat group aims to provide a safe space where contributors can disclose situations that they are currently experiencing. It’s not always the case that the original contributor will be looking for advice or feedback. Do not offer unsolicited advice or feedback without first checking the intentions of the original comment poster. Specifically, members should only give advice and feedback if the poster requested it. If in doubt, check first and use the Gestalt Protocol.

This code of conduct applies to all mcrtech spaces, including public channels, private channels and direct messages, both online and off. Anyone who violates this code of conduct may be sanctioned or expelled from these spaces at the administrators’ discretion.

Some mcrtech spaces may have additional rules in place, which will be made available to participants. Participants are responsible for knowing and abiding by these rules. For example, general political discussion should be contained to the #politics channel, which is opt-in. Political debate can get heated, but robust debate around ideas will be tolerated, although criticism of the person holding those views is not permitted.

Harassment includes:

• Offensive comments related to gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, mental illness, neuro(a)typicality, physical appearance, body size, 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 (e.g., 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
• Instances of Privileged Explaining

mcrtech prioritises marginalised people’s safety over privileged people’s comfort.

The administrators will not act on, and may act against those making 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
• Criticising racist, sexist, transphobic, or otherwise oppressive behaviour or assumptions

Reporting

If a member of mcrtech is harassing you, notice that someone else is being harassed, or have any other concerns, please contact one of the following members of the admin team directly by DM: @chrismatheson @cnorthwood @Hakim Cassimally @Parul Singh @s10wen @Tom

This code of conduct applies to mcrtech spaces, but if you are being harassed by a member of mcrtech outside our spaces, we still want to know about it. We will take all good-faith reports of harassment by mcrtech members, especially the administrators, 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 mcrtech based on their past behaviour, including behaviour outside mcrtech spaces and behaviour towards people who are not in mcrtech.

In order to protect volunteer admins 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 to protect 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 mcrtech members’ safety or the general public. We will not name harassment victims without their affirmative consent.

Consequences

Participants asked to stop any harassing behaviour are expected to comply immediately.

If a participant engages in harassing behaviour, the administrators may take any action they deem appropriate, up to and including expulsion from all mcrtech spaces and identification of the participant as a harasser to other mcrtech members or the general public.

Advertising

A team of dedicated admins runs mcrtech for the enjoyment and benefit of its members. Our admins give up their own time to foster and develop the community, and as such, we aim to keep the community an advertising-free zone. One exception to this is the #show channel, where community members can share projects or work they are launching that is of interest to the mcrtech community. If your only posts are in #show, however, we deem that to be advertising, rather than a place for community members to show their work. Similarly, events that are being run in or of specific interest to the Manchester/North West community are permitted to be posted in the #events channel, although repeated posting of the same event (other than reasonable reminders) will be considered spam. If you are an event organiser who only posts in #events, this is permitted but please ask an admin first. We take a firm stance on members posting advertisements of any kind in the community, and we reserve the right to remove posts that fall afoul of this rule. An admin will inform the poster, and an admin will remove persistent offenders from the Slack team.

Recruiting

We encourage members to share open job postings, and we have a #jobs channel specifically for this purpose. Re-posting across other channels or requesting re-posts in private channels is forbidden. We also support member-to-member recommendations. Soliciting via direct message is not permitted, except for contacting a poster of a job via Direct Message unless they have specifically asked not to do that. Soliciting includes pitching an agency or outsourcing via DM to a job poster that's clearly looking for permanent members of staff. Unpaid employment or anything else the admins consider exploitative employment, jobs based outside of the North West, or remote jobs being advertised by a company without a link to the area are not permitted. When posting a job, please include some basic details and not just a “DM me for more info” request - we highly encourage posting salaries on job ads (you are likely to be asked what the range is anyway, if you do not). Any discussions on a particular post should occur in a thread on that post. Although detail is encouraged, please do not post extremely long job ads (more than a screen high), especially shortly after a more recent post, as this can be seen as trying to bury your competition.

Examples of behaviour

The following are examples of behaviours we wish to discourage, and alternative suggestions that can help build a more positive community