code-of-conduct.md

Non-discrimination and diversity statement

denhac does not promote or discriminate against any person, population group, or organization with regard to categories protected by applicable United States law. These include, but are not limited to race, color, religion, sex, gender expression, sexuality, physical appearance, language, education background, national origin, age, disability, and veteran status.

denhac strives to create an inclusive environment where everyone can feel welcome and respected in our space. We know that, while there is not a formal hierarchy here as in a workplace, everyone comes into our space with their own different histories and social norms. We expect you to both communicate with each other about the boundaries/limits you wish to hold, and respect when someone else communicates a boundary with you. If a boundary is clearly expressed to you (whether in person, over Slack messages, or via other means), and you deliberately overstep that boundary, it will be treated as a violation of our anti-harassment policy. We believe that initial communication of a boundary can be done without board support in most cases, but please reach out to any member of the Board of Directors if you would like support of any kind in any phase of the process of boundary setting.

If you feel that you have been harassed at denhac or if someone has made you uncomfortable (even if you aren’t sure if it’s harassment), we encourage you to follow the reporting procedure in our code of conduct. We want to make the space better and creating a safe environment for you is important to making denhac better - but we can’t act to address potential issues if we aren’t made aware of them.

Code of conduct and anti-harassment policy

We expect everyone involved in our community to follow this code of conduct. This applies to all of our methods of communication.

We do not tolerate harassment of people at our events or space in any form.

Behavior considered as harassment includes, but is not limited to:

1. Offensive comments including epithets, slurs, negative stereotyping, verbal kidding, teasing, jokes, or intimidating acts related to race, religion, gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, or physical appearance. Consider that calling attention to differences can feel alienating.
2. Gratuitous sexual or obscene objects, images, discussions, or behavior.
3. Physical contact, romantic advances, or sexual attention that continues after a request to stop or "no" response.
4. Subtle or explicit demands for sexual activity.
5. Verbal abuse.
6. Threats or incitement of violence towards any individual, including encouraging a person to engage in self-harm
7. Deliberate intimidation by words, gestures, body language, or menacing behavior
8. Stalking
9. Harassing photography or recording, including logging online activity for harassment purposes
10. Continued one-on-one contact or communication after requests to cease
11. Deliberate “outing” of a sensitive aspect of a person’s identity without their consent
12. Deliberate misgendering. This includes dead-naming or persistently using a pronoun that does not correctly reflect a person’s gender identity
13. Retaliating against anyone who files a complaint that someone has violated this code of conduct

How to submit a harassment report

Reports should be submitted in writing on Slack or via denhac.org email to any member of our Board of Directors, listed at https://denhac.org/wiki/the-board; the entire board is also available via email at [email protected]. If your report is given to a single member of the Board, they will ask to pull in a second board member of your choice, to share the detailed context of the issue in order to better represent it to the rest of the board and help address the issue.

What happens when a harassment report is submitted

Report information will be shared and discussed privately over board-only slack and/or private board executive session - current board members are the only ones present at the time of discussion, but future board members may have access to the discussion log as well. Board members will investigate the report privately (potentially including use of our camera footage but we will check in with the reporter before taking any actions which might reidentify the reporter to a harasser), discuss and decide on next steps to address the incident, and communicate back to the reporter on the next steps chosen within a week after the next Executive Session completes. Anonymous summaries of public events that require a statement, and/or summary statistics around incident management, may also be shared more widely across denhac for transparency.

Potential consequences of violating the code of conduct

denhac reserves the right to terminate any membership at any time for any reason, but we strive for the process to be as fair and open as privacy and discretion allow us to be. Upon breaching of the denhac rules and member agreements, the following actions may be performed in any order:

• The member will get a verbal warning from a Director or a Manager.
• The member will be called before the Board to explain and/or discuss the behavior in question, usually within Executive Session.
• The member will receive a formal Warning, via letter or email, signed by a board member.
• The Member will be put on probation.
• Membership will be suspended for a length of time.
• Membership will be terminated.

Note that some offenses – such as non-payment of dues, or negligence leading to danger to our members or physical space – can trigger automatic membership suspension or termination, without a formal review by the Board.

Thank you to Geek Feminism Wiki for their detailed code of conduct documentation.