Community Agreement &
Anti-Harassment Policy
​
Community Agreement:
​​
Our goal is to provide a welcoming and inclusive forum where people from around the world can connect to discuss all things related to The Buy Nothing, Get Everything Plan.
​
We welcome posts and discussions here about everything we cover in our book. If you are angry at us for writing a book to empower the world to share more, send your thoughts to us via our email address. Our forum is not the right place to direct anger at anyone for their life choices or work.
​​
Our Community Agreement and Anti-Harassment Policy apply to all of our Buy Nothing, Get Everything community spaces, including public channels, private channels and direct messages, both online and off. Anyone who violates this code of conduct may be sanctioned or expelled from these spaces at the discretion of the authors and administrators. We reserve the right to edit and expand upon our Community Agreement and Anti-Harassment as we see fit, and all changes will be considered effective immediately.
We hold each person who participates in this community responsible for creating an environment in which diverse individuals can share, collaborate and interact in a positive and affirming way. Examples of behavior that contributes to creating this sort of environment include:
​
* Using welcoming and inclusive language
* Being respectful of differing viewpoints and experiences
* Focusing on what is best for the overall community
* Showing empathy towards other community members
*Treating others as they would like to be treated
*Being mindful not to monopolize discussions, creating space for others to speak and share
* Accepting that each person has the right to choose for themselves what they make of and from the ideas shared in this community
*Taking what works for you and allowing others the same freedom
*Remembering that there are many paths forward in line with the Buy Nothing, Get Everything philosophy and action plan
​
Anti-Harassment Policy:
The Buy Nothing, Get Everything Plan community is dedicated to providing a harassment-free experience for everyone. We do not tolerate harassment of participants in any form.
Harassment includes:
​
-
Offensive comments related to gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, mental illness, neuro(a)typicality, physical appearance, body size, age, race, or religion.
-
Unwelcome comments regarding a person’s lifestyle choices and practices, including those related to the topics covered in The Buy Nothing, Get Everything action plan, 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.
-
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 or following.
-
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.
-
The Buy Nothing, Get Everything community prioritizes marginalized people’s safety over privileged people’s comfort. The authors and admins reserve the right not to act on complaints regarding:
-
‘Reverse’ -isms, including ‘reverse racism,’ ‘reverse sexism,’ and ‘cisphobia’
-
Reasonable communication of boundaries, such as “leave me alone,” “go away,” or “I’m not discussing this with you.”
-
Communicating in a ‘tone’ you don’t find congenial
-
Criticizing racist, sexist, cissexist, or otherwise oppressive behavior or assumptions
-
​​
Reporting Harassment:
​
If you are being harassed by a member of the Buy Nothing, Get Everything community, notice that someone else is being harassed, or have any other concerns, please contact the community forum admins at forum@buynothinggeteverything.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.
​
This policy applies to Buy Nothing, Get Everything community spaces. We will take all good-faith reports of harassment by Buy Nothing, Get Everything community members, including those on our admin team, seriously. The authors and admin team reserve the right to exclude people from the Buy Nothing, Get Everything community based on their past behavior, including behavior outside the Buy Nothing, Get Everything community spaces and behavior towards people who are not in the Buy Nothing, Get Everything 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.
​
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 the Buy Nothing, Get Everything community 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 authors and admin team may take any action they deem appropriate, up to and including expulsion from all the Buy Nothing, Get Everything community spaces and identification of the participant as a harasser to other Buy Nothing, Get Everything community members or the general public.
Acknowledgements, Licenses and Attribution:
​
Our Community Agreement is adapted from the Community Covenant (http://community-covenant.net), version 1.0, available at http://community-covenant.net/version/1/0/. The Community Covenant is an open source effort and is built on codes of conduct that came before it, including the Contributor Covenant (http://contributor-covenant.org/) and the LGBTQ in Tech community code of conduct (http://lgbtq.technology/coc.html).
​
Our Anti-Harassment Policy is based on an original public domain anti-harassment document from Geek Feminism, which is licensed under the Creative Commons Zero license. You can view the original here: http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Community_anti-harassment
We are grateful to everyone who contributed to these source documents, both for all of their work and for offering these resources to all of us as a freely-given gift.
​