Community Code of Conduct

Last updated: January 30, 2020

WELCOME

Welcome to Urban Media Arts, an interconnected hub of creativity, dialog and evolving community. Thank you for participating in this wonderful experiment at UMA.

For this to work best, we invite your engagement, feedback, and expressions as appropriate and respectful as outlined in the following. 

OUR GOAL

The goal of this online hub is to nourish this community and to empower each participant to engage, learn, gain skills, give generously, be informed, and collaborate with others. We believe this online hub is a vital complement to the other programs, workshops, events, and opportunities we offer. As such, it goes without saying that this community must be dedicated to providing a harassment-free experience for everyone. We do not tolerate harassment of participants in any form.

EXPECTATION

The rules and guidelines contained herein are to illustrate the behavior expected from our members. They may be updated from time to time on an as-needed basis, but should not be considered exhaustive, and may not address all inappropriate behavior. As such, we reserve the right to address any behavior we feel is inappropriate in our community, and to suspend access to this website at any time for reasons that include, but are not necessarily limited to, failure to abide by our rules. Remedies for infringements against our rules will be decided on a case-by-case basis.

APPLICABILITY AND SCOPE

This code of conduct applies to all of this community’s spaces, including public pages/profiles/groups, private pages/profiles/groups, 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 administrators.

CONTENT POLICY

Do not post illegal content or copyrighted content without permission. We reserve the right to remove or alter any content posted at any time without explanation. Requests for removal or modification of content will be undertaken at our sole discretion.

IDENTITY AND PRIVACY

Do not attempt to impersonate anyone else on this website. You are not required to publicly identify yourself but do not attempt to misrepresent yourself as someone else, or as a member of the Urban Media Arts staff.

Respect the privacy of other users. Do not publicly post personal information of other users without permission, including but not limited to: names, email addresses, private phone numbers, addresses, or photos.

OFFENSIVE CONTENT

Do not post or link to content which contains or references any of the following:

• ethnic, national, racial and/or religious slurs
• promotion of ethnic, national, racial and/or religious hatred
• derogatory terms regarding the sex or sexual orientations or practices of others
• derogatory references to religions, the non-religious, or religious figures
• extreme and/or violent sexual acts
• threats of violence
• performing illegal activities
• pornography
• inappropriate content regarding human anatomy or bodily functions

HARASSMENT AND DEFAMATION

While criticism of business practices is certainly allowed, defamation and harassment are not. Do not encourage or participate in ongoing harassment of other users or groups of people, and keep criticism relevant to the topic of the post, group, or activity and avoid defamatory statements.

SPAMMING AND TROLLING

Spamming and trolling are expressly disallowed.

“Spamming” includes, but is not limited to:

• excessive repetition of the same phrase, similar phrases, or pure gibberish
• creating separate threads regarding an existing active topic in one or more forums
• creating forum threads or activity posts with the sole purpose of linking another post
• advertisements which are excessive and/or not directly related to a current topic of discussion

“Trolling” includes, but is not limited to:

• posting in a manner specifically intended to provoke emotional responses
• personal attacks and/or use of derogatory terms towards other users
• intentionally causing disturbances in posts by picking fights or making off-topic posts to disrupt a conversation
  creating posts for the sole purpose of causing unrest
• flaming – messages which personally attack other users or call them names
• posting flamebait – content that appears to either be intended to or likely to, cause arguments rather than promote or enhance discussion

IMPEDING SITE FUNCTIONALITY

Actions that harm the smooth functioning of the site are prohibited. These include, but are not limited to:

abusing the report feature by sending false and/or nonsensical reports
creating posts or threads to create a public discussion of disciplinary actions on the website outside of the appropriate forum

GENERAL CONDUCT GUIDELINES

Do:

• act in a mature fashion befitting a community of professional entrepreneurs and participants
• post in a fashion which contributes to the discussion
• respect the Urban Media Arts staff, interns, board and members
• follow directives from the Urban Media Arts staff
• offer constructive criticism rather than abuse or disparagement

Do not:

• create posts or threads to publicly discuss disciplinary actions taken against a community member
• hijack posts or threads by attempting to redirect the topic of a discussion
• use multiple accounts (“sockpuppets”). If you feel you have a legitimate reason to have another account, contact the Urban Media Arts staff
• attempt to circumvent a ban or suspension, either using an alternate account or getting someone to post on your behalf
• post in all capital letters, or make excessive use of punctuation and/or non-standard symbols
• use misleading post titles
• post threads in inappropriate forums for their topic
• abuse editing privileges to meaningfully change the content of posts after people have already seen them

DISPUTE RESOLUTION

If you have a personal problem with another user, try to resolve it in private messages rather than hashing it out in public.

If you have a dispute which cannot be resolved in such a manner, use the report feature to bring it to the attention of the Urban Media Arts staff.

REPORTING

If dispute resolution has failed and you are still being harassed by a member of our community, notice that someone else is being harassed, or have any other concerns, please contact the administrators utilizing the report features on any negative content. 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. 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 and/or contacting the admins by email at contact@urbanmediaarts.org.

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 seriously. This includes harassment outside our spaces and harassment that took place at any point in time. The abuse 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 our team and users 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.