These community guidelines apply to all African Digital Heritage (ADH) community spaces, both online and off. The violation and intentional disregard of this Code of Conduct may result in the sanctioning and expelling from these spaces at the discretion of ADH. This policy is a “living” document, subject to expansion and refinement in the future. Participants and community members are responsible for knowing and abiding by these guidelines.
Zero Tolerance for Harassment
The African Digital Heritage community is committed to creating and fostering a harassment-free experience for everyone, regardless of religion, age, race, physical appearance, disability, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity and expression. We do not tolerate harassment of participants and members in any form.
Harassment includes:
- Offensive comments related to gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, mental illness, 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’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- both online or physically
- 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.
No Confidential Information
We kindly request that you do not share confidential information. While it is our desire for the African Digital Heritage community to be transparent and open, this is not an appropriate space for sharing personal and/or institutional confidential information.
Not a Marketing Channel
We are deeply excited to encourage active participation from all the different areas and partners we engage with, but please do not use the ADH community space for the blatant promotion of products or services. As an accountability measure, other community members may monitor the community in order to help keep it a useful, fruitful, and trusted environment, free from spam and self-promotion.
Reporting
If you are being harassed by a member of the ADH community, notice that someone else is being harassed, or have any other concerns, please do not hesitate to contact us at community@africandigitalheritage.com. 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.
These guidelines apply to the ADH community space, but if you are being harassed by an individual of the ADH community outside these spaces, we would still want to know about it. We endeavor to take into good-faith reports of harassment by ADH community members seriously. This includes harassment outside our community spaces and harassment that took place at any point in time. The ADH team reserves the right to exclude people from these community spaces based on their past behavior, including behavior outside of the ADH community spaces and behavior towards people who are not in the ADH community.
Reports intended to silence legitimate criticism may be deleted without response.
We will uphold and 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 the ADH community members or the general public. We will not name harassment victims without their affirmative consent.
Consequences
Participants that have been asked to stop any harassing behavior are expected to comply immediately. If a participant engages in harassing behavior, we may take any action they deem appropriate, up to and including expulsion from all ADH community spaces and identification of the participant as a harasser to other ADH community members or the general public.
