Overview
The AGoT Community is dedicated to providing a harassment-free experience for everyone. We do not tolerate harassment of participants in any form. The rules within this document directly apply to all spaces managed by AGoT Global Operations Team and its Community team. All spaces and events maintained by other members of the community are advised to implement and moderate the rules from this document, and to request assistance where needed.
Our main goal is to grow and sustain the community in a way that handles and learns from issues rather than ignores them or considers them ‘a one off’. We want people to take responsibility for their actions and learn from them, rather immediately resorting to punishment.
While the AGoT Global Operations Team is being built out and managed community spaces are created/defined, we hope that existing groups will opt to align with the policies in this document and have their own moderation teams act in the same way.
Code of conduct
This code of conduct applies to all AGoT Community spaces, including Facebook groups, Discords and Events, both online and off. Anyone who violates this code of conduct may be sanctioned or expelled from these spaces at the discretion of the community team and/or event organizers.
Some AGoT Community 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:
- Any language used in an abusive manner towards another community member.
- 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 rejected names.
- Gratuitous or off-topic sexual images or behavior in spaces where they are 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.
- Disparagement humor, which makes a punchline of the marginalized.
- Any continuation of a joke after a request to stop.
AGoT Community prioritizes marginalized people’s safety over privileged people’s comfort. Organizing teams & advocates reserve 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
Community Team
A Community Team will exist to moderate community spaces and events, promote social engagement, and help support members of AGoT Community and organizers in dealing with matters related to the code of conduct. The team will have the power to enforce rules within spaces and events managed within the scope of AGoT Global Organization Team.
The members of the Community Team are to be confirmed as part of the building out of the AGoT Global Organization Team and Community Team.
Reporting
If a member of AGoT Community is harassing you, you notice that someone else is being harassed, or have any other concerns, please contact the advocate team at [email protected] or through other social channels. 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. If you want to report a concern anonymously, please use the form at the bottom of this page.
This code of conduct applies to AGoT Community spaces, but if a member of AGoT Community outside our spaces is harassing you, we still want to know about it. We will take all good-faith reports of harassment by AGoT Community members seriously. This includes harassment outside our spaces and harassment that took place at any point in time. The Community Team reserves the right to exclude people from AGoT Community based on their past behavior, including behaviour outside AGoT Community spaces and behavior towards people who are not in AGoT Community.
Members of teams linked to the AGoT Global Operations Team are not above the rules within this document. Any complaints against members will be reviewed in the same manner as any other report, and subject to the same moderation rules plus any subsequent rules defined within their own teams.
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 have received harassment complaints, or privately warn third parties about them, if we believe that doing so will increase the safety of AGoT Community members or the public. We will not name harassment victims without their affirmative consent.
Consequences
Participants asked to stop any harassing behavior are expected to comply immediately.
If a participant engages in harassing behavior, the Community Team may take any action they deem appropriate, up to and including expulsion from all AGoT Community spaces and identification of the participant as a harasser to other AGoT Community members or the public.
Attribution
This anti-harassment policy is based on the example policy from the Geek Feminism wiki, created by the Geek Feminism community.
