Community Guidelines

The Library Collective strives to foster a peer-to-peer professional development environment that allows for freedom of expression -- one where healthy debate is encouraged and everyone is celebrated for sharing their own questions, stories, and perspectives. Our goal is to tackle big questions and work together to discover all of the potential answers. That can only happen when we are committed to collaboration and true knowledge sharing. We value kindness, constructive criticism, mutual respect, and understanding. We do not condone callout culture directed towards individuals.

The Library Collective is also dedicated to providing harassment-free experiences for everyone, regardless of gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, age, religion, or creed. We do not tolerate harassment of participants, hate speech, or fundamentalism of any kind. Participants violating these rules may be sanctioned or expelled from the event/community at the discretion of the organizers.

Harassment includes offensive verbal comments related to gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, age, religion, creed, or political affiliation and/or deliberate intimidation, stalking, following, trolling, harassing photography or recording, sustained disruption of talks or other events, inappropriate physical contact, and unwelcome sexual attention. Participants asked to stop any harassing behavior are expected to comply immediately.

If a participant engages in harassing behavior, the organizers may take any action they deem appropriate, including warning the offender or expulsion from the event or community with no refund. If you are being harassed, notice that someone else is being harassed, or have any other concerns, please contact a member of The Library Collective team immediately.

We expect participants to follow these rules at all event venues—be they physical or virtual— and at event-related social activities.

The Library Collective organizers will be happy to help participants contact hotel/venue security or local law enforcement, provide escorts, or otherwise assist those experiencing harassment to feel safe for the duration of the event.

Anyone who has has questions or has witnessed a violation of our Community Guidelines should immediately contact a member of The Library Collective team by finding a nearby volunteer (in a green lanyard), sending a message to the #problems channel on Slack, or by emailing program@thelibrarycollective.org.


Social Media Use - Contributing to a Generous Dialogue

We strongly recommend these social media guidelines for all participants, adapted from Ryan Cordell’s Principles of Conference Tweeting, to help us maintain a positive, inclusive community that is welcoming to all our diverse participants:

  • Post praise generously, sharing what you find interesting about presentations.

  • Share pertinent links to people and projects, in order to bring attention to your colleagues’ work.

  • When posting questions or critiques, include the panelist’s username (an @ mention) whenever possible, to encourage healthy dialogue.

  • If the panelist does not have a username—or if you cannot find it—do your best to alert them when you post questions or critiques, rather than leaving them to discover those engagements independently.

  • Do not post questions to Twitter or Social Media that you would not ask face-to-face.

  • Do not use a tone on Twitter that you would not use when speaking to the same individual in person.

  • Avoid “crosstalk”—joking exchanges only tangentially related to the talk—unless the presenter is explicitly involved in the chatter.

  • Refuse to post or engage with posts that comment on the presenter’s person, rather than the presenter’s ideas.


Acknowledgements

Parts of this Code of Conduct were lightly adapted from the example policy from the Geek Feminism wiki, created by the Ada Initiative and other volunteers, which is under a Creative Commons Zero license.