PURPOSE

This policy is a "living" document, and subject to refinement and expansion in the future. Last updated September 27, 2018.

At Withfriends, we believe that helping community organizations and small businesses thrive makes our cities more vibrant, diverse, and inclusive.

Everyone participating in the Withfriends community is required to agree to the following Code of Conduct. This includes all organizers, performers, members, attendees, volunteers, and staff involved with the platform.
Withfriends is dedicated to providing a harassment-free experience for everyone, regardless of gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, mental illness, neurotype, physical appearance, body, age, race, ethnicity, nationality, language, or religion. We do not tolerate harassment of participants in any form.
Anyone who violates this Code of Conduct may be sanctioned or expelled from the Withfriends platform at the discretion of the Withfriends staff.

DEFINITIONS

Harassment includes but is not limited to:

• Offensive comments related to gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, mental illness, neurotype, physical appearance, body, age, race, ethnicity, nationality, language, 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 ‘dead’ or rejected names
• Gratuitous or off-topic sexual images or behaviour 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 other community members or other vulnerable people from intentional abuse
• Publication of non-harassing private communication without consent by the involved parties
Withfriends prioritizes marginalized people’s safety over privileged people’s comfort. Withfriends reserves 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

CONSEQUENCES

Participants asked to stop any harassing behavior are expected to comply immediately.
If a participant engages in harassing behavior, Withfriends may take any action we deem appropriate, up to and including expulsion from the Withfriends platform and identification of the participant as a harasser to other Withfriends community members.
We expect members of our Withfriends community to follow these rules at all events, event-related social activities, and social media.

REPORTING AND ENFORCEMENT

If you experience harassment within an event, space, or community included on the Withfriends platform, notice that someone else is being harassed, or have any other concerns, please contact us immediately via email at conduct@withfriends.co. You can also make an anonymous report here. We can't follow up an anonymous report with you directly, but we will fully investigate it and take whatever action is necessary to prevent a recurrence.

If the person who is harassing you is a member of the Withfriends staff, they will recuse themselves from handling your incident. All reports will be handled in the strictest confidence. In some cases we may determine that a public statement will need to be made. If that's the case, the identities of all victims and reporters will remain confidential unless those individuals instruct us otherwise.

If you are unsure whether the incident is a violation, or whether the space where it happened is covered by this Code of Conduct, we encourage you to still report it. We would much rather have a few extra reports where we decide to take no action, rather than miss a report of an actual violation. We do not look negatively on you if we find the incident is not a violation. And knowing about incidents that are not violations, or happen outside our spaces, can also help us to improve the Code of Conduct or the processes surrounding it.

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This anti-harassment policy is based on resources provided by Geek Feminism, and borrows from similar open source policies authored by XOXO Fest, Django, and JSConf.