- Be respectful of others
- Do not harass others
- Do not share personal information of others to people outside the community
- Do not divulge privileged information of any company, to anyone in our team
- Job opportunities can be posted in #work-opportunities, professional recruitment is not allowed
- Don't spam the channels with links, or links to pages, for the purpose of monetization of user views and which provide no value to the ZA Developer community
- Select channels are publicly archived and searchable at http://zadevelopers.slackarchive.io
Acting according to our code of conduct should not leave you in an embarrassing situation. That said, be careful never to divulge any personal or confidential information in Slack. Apart from the public archiving we have no control over how anybody else in the team could be logging and using the information provided by anyone else.
This is a safe space, lets keep it that way.
“ZA Developers” in this document refers to the ZA Developers Slack organization at https://zadevelopers.slack.com/. “The administrators” refers to the administrators on this organization, a list is available at the top of the Team Directory (must be a member of the organization to view).
ZA Developers is dedicated to providing a harassment-free experience for everyone. We do not tolerate harassment of participants in any form.
This code of conduct applies to all ZA Developers 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 discretion of the administrators.
Some ZA Developers 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.
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 (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
The ZA Developers group, and its admins, acknowledge that finding skilled developers in South Africa is a serious problem that needs serious attention. However, the ZA Developers slack channel is first and foremost a safe space for developers to talk, share and collaborate. Therefore, the following are specific conditions regarding recruitment, and recruitment opportunities.
- Professional recruiters are regrettably not allowed access to the ZA Developers group under any circumstances.
- Users (including admins) may not under any circumstances share personal details of ZA Developers members with recruiters without that user's explicit consent.
- Advertising an opportunity in brief within the #work-opportunities channel is acceptable. Further discussions must happen via direct messages.
- Opportunities must not, under any circumstances, use referral program links where the poster of the message could benefit, e.g. via earning a commission.
We value being able to attract talent to our teams, and a brief message should allow it. New teams in particular are encouraged to post a "We're hiring" message.
If you are being harassed by a member of ZA Developers, notice that someone else is being harassed, or have any other concerns, please contact an admin directly via DM. Administrators will respond as soon as they are able. If the person who is harassing you is on the admin team, they will recuse themselves from handling your incident.
This code of conduct applies to ZA Developers spaces, but if you are being harassed by a member of ZA Developers outside of our spaces, we still want to know about it. We will take all good-faith reports of harassment by ZA Developers 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 ZA Developers based on their past behavior, including behavior outside ZA Developers spaces and behavior towards people who are not members of the ZA Developers community.
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 of ZA Developers members or the general public. We will not name harassment victims without their affirmative consent.
The ZA Developers community is a collection of professional developers, as such it is expected that the content made available by members of the community should at all times adhere to the acceptable content policy. This policy is intended to protect the community's image, as well as the image of its members, through restrictions on certain classes of content which may be deemed to be unsuitable in a work or family context.
Classes of content which we deem to be unsuitable include:
- Pornographic or sexually suggestive material, either in graphic or text form.
- Depictions of physical or emotional abuse, either in graphic or text form.
- Persecution of any individual as a result of their race, gender, religion or other physical traits.
- Material intended to, without basis, harm the reputation of any individual whether a member or not.
- Unsolicited advertising with the exception of job offers in the #work-opportunities channel.
- Links, or links to pages, for the purpose of monetization of user views and which provide no value to the ZA Developer community.
As a quick self-check, ask yourself whether you would like someone's child to see the content you are posting. If the answer is "no", then there's a good chance you shouldn't be posting it on the ZA Developers community.
Participants asked to stop any harassing behavior are expected to comply immediately.
If a participant engages in harassing behavior, the administrators may take any action they deem appropriate, up to and including expulsion from all ZA Developers spaces and identification of the participant as a harasser to other ZA Developers members and/or the general public.
Channels may be publicly archived at the discretion of the channel owner or the team admins. This serves three purposes:
- To get around the 10,000 message limit in free Slack teams
- To retain valuable information for future team members and the general public, and
- To promote healthy discourse in all the channels.
The archives are available online to the public at http://zadevelopers.slackarchive.io.
This can vary over time. Have a look at http://zadevelopers.slackarchive.io, or check in the channel members for the @logger bot user.
Bots in Slack cannot automatically join channels, they have to be invited. So invite @logger by entering /invite @logger into the message box in Slack, in the channel you want the logger invited to.
Slack supports private channels and direct messages to facilitate "off the record" conversations. If you need to, please make use of those features. At the time archiving was enabled (August 2016), nearly 75% of all team communication happened in direct messages and private channels.
We feel this requirement is adequately covered by the above built-in Slack feature, but please be aware that this does not preclude the possiblility that anyone else could be recording your private conversations.
If someone accidentally enabled archiving, or you want the logger removed later, ask one of the team administrators to kick @logger from the channel.
We would generally like to discourage disabling archiving long after the fact.
In the (hopefully rare) even that you'd want a message removed from the archives, contact the team admins with a direct link to the message to be removed. The admins can then pass it on to Slack Archive for removal. Alternatively just send a request to hello AT slackarchive DOT io directly.
This code of conduct is subject to change as circumstances require, all current members of the ZA Developers community will be notified through the #code-of-conduct channel prior to these changes taking effect.
If you feel there are aspects to this code of conduct which should be modified, please open a pull request with your suggested changes at https://github.com/zadev/code-of-conduct.
This Code of Conduct is heavily based on the LGBTQ in Tech Code of Conduct and the Offline First Code of Conduct for Slack.