This policy is a living document, subject to ongoing refinement and expansion.
We encourage you to check it often.

About This Code of Conduct

The goal of this document is to provide a single point of reference for all our community spaces and events, both online and in person.

The EA community spans multiple channels, platforms and forms of social media. This includes public channels, private channels, direct messages, and all forms of live events.

These are also the standards to which we hold anyone who represents EA when they interact with our community and industry, and are in addition to any Codes of Conduct in place at events they attend.

The current admins are:

• Marguerite Kenner (Twitter, email)
• Alasdair Stuart (Twitter, email)

Our Goal

EA’s community is dedicated to providing a harassment-free space for everyone. We do not tolerate harassment of participants or staff in any form. Participants asked to stop any harassing behavior are expected to comply immediately.

Anyone who violates this code of conduct may be subject to the consequences detailed below. This includes being temporarily or permanently expelled from these spaces.

A Welcoming and Safe Environment

We aim to create environments in which diverse individuals can collaborate and interact in a positive and affirming way. Examples of behavior that contributes to creating this sort of environment include:

• Actively working towards building a safe community for all
• Cultivating a network of support and encouragement
• Encouraging responsible and varied forms of expression
• Using welcoming and inclusive language
• Being respectful of differing viewpoints and experiences
• Gracefully accepting constructive criticism
• Focusing on what is best for the overall community
• Showing empathy towards other community members

As a member of our community, you agree:

• We are collectively and individually committed to safety and inclusivity
• We have zero tolerance for abuse, harassment, or discrimination
• We respect people’s boundaries and identities

We condemn and will not tolerate:

• Harassment
• Threats of harm
• Stalking, doxxing, or publishing private information
• Anything that compromises a person’s safety

And if we act in a way which another considers offensive, we will:

• Listen actively and without interruption
• Not attempt to disqualify what the person has to say
• Make the effort to learn about the offense caused
• Apologize sincerely, without qualification and in a timely manner

Anti-Harassment Stance

EA’s community does not tolerate harassment of any kind. Examples include:

• Using language that can be considered oppressive (systemically or otherwise). Examples include offensive comments related to gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, mental illness, neuro(a)typicality, physical appearance, pregnancy status, veteran status, political affiliation, marital status, body size, age, race, national origin, ethnic origin, nationality, immigration status, language, religion or lack thereof, or other identity marker. This includes anti-Indigenous/Nativeness and anti-Blackness.
• Unwelcome comments regarding a person’s lifestyle choices and practices, including those related to food, health, fitness, parenting, relationships, drugs, and employment
• Deliberate misgendering, using inappropriate pronouns, or use of “dead” or 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
• Negging and other forms of manipulation or attempted manipulation through deliberate backhanded compliments or otherwise flirtatious remarks with the aim of undermining the recipient’s confidence and increasing their need for the commentor’s approval.
• Threats of violence
• Incitement of violence towards any individual or group, including encouraging a person to commit suicide or to engage in self-harm
• Deliberate intimidation
• Stalking or following – online or in the physical world
• Harassing photography or recording, including logging online activity for harassment purposes
• Sustained disruption of discussion
• Unwelcome sexual attention
• Patterns of inappropriate social contact, such as requesting/assuming inappropriate levels of intimacy with others
• Continued one-on-one communication (private or public) 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
• Using offensive topics as a form of humor. Jokes that resemble the above count as harassment even if meant satirically or ironically.

Confidentiality

Please be mindful that things you say here may at some point become public. We cannot prevent people from screencapping or otherwise logging conversations. We also can’t guarantee that every member’s login credentials and logged-in devices are secure. Files uploaded may be accessible by anyone with credentials.

Please exercise caution and refrain from sharing sensitive information that could harm you or others if it became public.

Reporting

If you are being harassed by a member of our community, notice that someone else is being harassed, or have any other concerns, please contact the administrators via a private message on the platform, or by email. If the person who is harassing you is on the admin team, they will not be involved in handling or resolving the incident.

The admin team will respond to any complaint as promptly as possible we can. If you do not get a timely response (for example, if no admins are currently online) then please put your personal safety and well-being first, and consider logging out until your message has been responded to.

This code of conduct applies to our community’s spaces, but if you are being harassed by a member of our community outside our spaces, we still want to know about it. We will take all good-faith reports of harassment by our members, especially the administrators or EA’s staff, seriously. This includes harassment outside our spaces and harassment that took place at any point in time. The admin team reserves the right to exclude people from the community based on their past behavior, including behavior outside of our spaces and behavior towards people who are not in this community.

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.

Enforcement Process

Every Code of Conduct violation report will be treated with seriousness and care. If a member’s immediate safety and security is threatened, an individual admin may take any action that they deem appropriate, up to and including temporarily banning the offender from the community. In less urgent situations, at least two admins will discuss the offense and mutually arrive at a suitable response, which will be shared with the offender privately. Whatever the resolution that they decide upon, the decision of the admins involved in a violation case will be considered final.

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’ve received harassment complaints, or privately warn third parties about them, if we believe that doing so will increase the safety of our members or the general 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 admins may take any action they deem appropriate, up to and including expulsion from privately maintained platforms and identifying the participant publicly as someone about whom we’ve received complaints.

Failing to follow the community guidelines as described in this document carries consequences.

• For minor infractions, you may be temporarily suspended from the platform or a part of it.
• Upon repeat offenses, or if the community believes you are not acting in good faith, you may be removed permanently.

At the discretion of the admins, or by request, one or more of the parties involved may request to discuss the violation and how to avoid similar situations in the future.

Message Retention

Most of our community spaces have limited message and file retention. However the companies which maintain them may have complete logs of all activity. Most of the companies who maintain these platforms are U.S. companies and therefore subject to subpoenas and other enforcement proceedings from U.S. courts. Logs may be subject to enforcement action and could become public as part of legal proceedings.

Acknowledgements and License

This code of conduct is based on the following sources:

• The Community Covenant. The Community Covenant is an open source effort and is built on codes of conduct that came before it, including the Contributor Covenant and the LGBTQ in Tech community code of conduct. The Community Covenant by Coraline Ada Ehmke is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
• Annalee Flower Horne’s Sample Slack Code of Conduct, which is in turn based on Geek Feminism’s Community Anti-Harassment Policy, adapted for our own use under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License.
• Cypheroftyr’s Discord code of conduct
• The Rusty Quill Discord Community Code

Last update: 27 July 2020