Rationale
It’s important that our Slack community is a space where members feel able to candidly discuss their challenges, successes and ongoing work without fear of negative consequences such as comments being taken out of context or shared with unintended audiences. However, we also know that not everyone is able to keep up with all of the discussions in Slack as they happen and so we send out a weekly newsletter to members to give them additional opportunities to engage in ongoing conversations.
To balance between these two considerations of respecting privacy and supporting engagement, we created the following guidelines for how we will produce a weekly newsletter that doesn’t jeopardize the context of our shared space on Slack.
These guidelines are informed by our core values and apply alongside the CSCCE Community Participation Guidelines which apply to all of our community spaces.
Newsletter content
Permission to include content in the newsletter
- We won’t ask for permission from Slack group members every time we want to post something because this would end up making additional work for multiple people each week. But we will abide by the guidelines described.
- Any community member can indicate at any point that they do not want their content to be included in the newsletter and we will respect this request. Members should email info@www.cscce.org with these requests.
Audience for newsletter
- Our Slack newsletter is only ever sent to Slack members and we will make this clear at the bottom of every email. We currently do this with the following text:
We are sending this email to members of CSCCE’s community of practice on Slack. No one else will receive this email from us and only logged in members of the CSCCE Slack can click through to view the linked content. We are trialing this weekly roundup because we understand that many of you are extremely busy and may not be able to keep up with ongoing conversations. This weekly digest is intended to help you cut through the noise and stay involved. We’d love to hear your feedback, so email info@www.cscce.org if you have thoughts or questions.
Respecting privacy and avoiding harm
- Slack links only work for group members – if you’re not a member of the CSCCE Slack group and you were forwarded the Slack email newsletter you couldn’t see any of the content of the conversations if you clicked on the links.
- When we refer to conversations that have taken place in Slack we will not include information that might be reasonably assumed to be sensitive. This might include contact details (unless permission has been explicitly given to share), discussion of the nuances of business decisions, and anything where additional context is crucial to the reader’s understanding.
- We would never knowingly name someone in such a way that might cause them to feel embarrassed, vulnerable, or where they might lose status in some way by the information being shared more broadly. For example, we will never include things like “X is having problems with their boss this week…” or “Y is struggling with self-care”.
- We also won’t take Slack conversations and use details of specific threads as marketing elsewhere, other than making general, anonymized statements such as “in Slack we’re talking about running online events”. Where there are circumstances where it would make sense to share additional details e.g. during a conference talk, permission will be sought from members to do so.