Code of Conduct
This is was adopted at the March 2021 Business Meeting.
The suspension and expulsion sanctions may require Bylaws changes which would have to be drafted and adopted at a formal meeting of members with 10 days’ notice. Giving that notice would require a board decision. The Code of Conduct will apply to the extent permitted by the Bylaws. As a temporary measure until the Bylaws can be amended, if the Code of Conduct Committee adopts a consequence that can only be implemented as a decision of the members, the Committee may recommend that consequence in a report at a business meeting, at which it must either pass on the Consensus Agenda, if there are no objections, or be voted upon without debate.
Code of Conduct
The Hack Manhattan (HM) community is dedicated to providing a harassment-free experience for everyone, regardless of gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, ethnicity, or religion. We do not tolerate harassment of participants in any form.
This code of conduct applies to all Hack Manhattan sponsored spaces, including our mailing lists, chat (e.g. our Slack), as well as any other spaces that Hack Manhattan hosts, both online and off. Anyone who violates this code of conduct may be sanctioned or expelled from these spaces at the discretion of the Hack Manhattan Code of Conduct Committee (CoC Committee).
Some Hack Manhattan-sponsored 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.
Definitions
Harassment includes:
- Offensive comments related to gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, mental illness, neuro(a)typicality, physical appearance, body size, race, ethnicity, or religion
- Sustained disruption of discussion
- 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 behavior in spaces where they’re not appropriate
- 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 or history of trauma without their consent, except as necessary to protect other members or other vulnerable people from intentional abuse
- Publication of non-harassing private communication
- Harassing photography or recording, including logging online activity for harassment purposes
- Unwelcome sexual attention
- Physical contact and simulated physical contact (for example, 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
The Hack Manhattan community prioritizes marginalized people’s safety over privileged people’s comfort. The Hack Manhattan Code of Conduct Committee will not act on complaints regarding:
- "Reverse"-isms, including "reverse racism," "reverse sexism," and "cisphobia" (because these things don't exist)
- Reasonable communication of boundaries, such as "leave me alone," "go away," or "I'm not discussing this with you."
- Refusal to explain or debate social justice concepts
- Communicating in a "tone" you don’t find positive enough
- Criticizing racist, sexist, cissexist, or otherwise oppressive behavior or assumptions
Reporting
If you are being harassed by a member of the Hack Manhattan community, notice that someone else is being harassed, or have any other concerns, please submit a report or concern by emailing the Code of Conduct Committee. You may report harassment anonymously, or you can choose to include your contact information if you would like the Code of Conduct Committee to follow up with you for further investigation or to communicate actions that have been taken.
Reports will be handled by the Hack Manhattan Code of Conduct Committee. For the time being, the Code of Conduct Committee is identical to the Board of Directors, and can be contacted at:
Email: board@hackmanhattan.com
The members may appoint a permanent Code of Conduct Committee in due course, and may appoint new members to and remove members from the CoC Committee from time to time. Appointments and removals may also be made on an ad hoc basis for the consideration of a particular incident or set of incidents only. Decisions relating to the CoC Committee may be taken at a monthly business meeting as a decision of the members.
If the person who is harassing you is on the CoC Committee, they will recuse themselves from handling your incident. In this situation, you may also contact an individual CoC Committee member instead of submitting a report on the form, or have a friend submit your report. Otherwise, please do not contact private email addresses or social media accounts for reporting harassment.
If you contact the committee with a concern or report, we collectively commit to acknowledging your report within 24 hours. If you contact an individual member of the committee, we cannot commit that specific individual to a specific response time, but they will make their best effort to respond as quickly as possible. By default, we commit to making a decision about your report within 10 business days. Depending on the situation, we may commit (clearly) to a different timeline for a decision. We reserve the right to reject any report we believe to have been made in bad faith.
Scope
This code of conduct applies to Hack Manhattan sponsored spaces, but if you are being harassed by a member of the HM community outside our spaces, we still want to know about it. We will take all good-faith reports of harassment by Hack Manhattan community members seriously. This includes harassment outside our spaces and harassment that took place at any point in time. The Code of Conduct Committee reserves the right to exclude people from the HM community based on their past behavior, including behavior outside HM spaces and behavior towards people who are not in the HM community.
Goals
The primary goal of Hack Manhattan’s Code of Conduct enforcement is to protect Hack Manhattan (and its members and other participants) from harm.
There is other work that we do to support our primary goal—for example, showing folks what acceptable behavior looks like, educating individuals as to why their conduct was harmful, and serving as an instantiation of our feminist values—but our first priority is to protect our community, especially members who have been the target of a Code of Conduct violation.
This model means that there are some things the Code of Conduct Committee doesn’t do. We do not facilitate apologies, provide mediation of disputes, coach harassers on how to be better, or pass messages between harassers and targets. We may choose an action that is not exactly the target’s desired response, based on our scope, goal of protecting the community, and understanding of the situation.
Confidentiality
We will respect confidentiality requests for the purpose of protecting targets of abuse. At our discretion, we may publicly name a person about whom we’ve received harassment complaints, or warn the members only, or privately warn third parties about them, if we believe that doing so will increase the safety of HM members or the general public. We will not name harassment targets without their affirmative consent.
Consequences
If a participant engages in harassing behavior or other behavior that violates the Code of Conduct, the CoC Committee may take any action we deem appropriate given the seriousness of the violation and other factors we find relevant. Enforcement of the Code of Conduct does not by itself constitute violation of the Code of Conduct.
Example actions and consequences may include:
- A verbal warning or email warning to a person that their behavior was unacceptable
- A notice to the members mailing list
- A temporary or permanent ban from the space and/or online platforms such as Slack and the email lists.
- Temporary or permanent removal of membership
- Involving the HM Board if there is a legal risk to HM or legal action necessary
- Identification of a participant as a harasser to other HM members or the general public
Participants asked to stop any harassing behavior are expected to comply immediately.
Credit
This Code of Conduct is mostly a copy of the Double Union Code of Conduct. Thank you. https://doubleunion.org/policies/
