Conduct

Community Standards

All members and guests are expected to contribute towards building a welcoming and inclusive environment.

Our Community is:
Considerate of others and how our actions impacts others.
Respectful of others, their time, their skills, and their efforts.
Helpful. Clean, maintain, organize, and improve. Always leave things better than you found them
Collaborative. Work with others to improve the organization, our space, and resources. Actively share tools, resources, and knowledge with others. Be welcoming of questions, and answer them kindly.
Honest. Stuff breaks. When you break something, own up to it. If you have any doubt about fixing it, ask for help.
Safe. Handle all tools and resources carefully, ensuring that you are protecting others and yourself. Follow established procedures and signage. Never bypass safety systems.

Code of Conduct

MechaSpark is dedicated to providing a harassment-free experience for everyone. We do not tolerate any harassment of members or guests in any form.

This code of conduct applies to all MechaSpark spaces, events, and in our Discord server. Anyone who violates this code of conduct may be sanctioned or expelled from these spaces at the discretion of Memberships & Volunteers Chair.

Some MechaSpark spaces may have additional rules in place, which will be made clearly available to participants. Participants are responsible for knowing and abiding by these rules.

Harassment includes, but is not limited to:
Offensive comments related to gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, mental illness, neuro(a)typically, physical appearance, body size, age, race, 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 are not appropriate
Physical contact and simulated physical contact (e.g. 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

MechaSpark priorities marginalized people’s safety over privileged people’s comfort. Our Membership & Volunteers chair reserves the right to not 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

If you are being harassed by a member of MechaSpark, notice that someone is being harassed, or notice anyone being unsafe, or have any other concerns, please contact:

Complaints at complaints@mechaspark.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 code of conduct applies to MechaSpark spaces, but if you are being harassed by a member of MechaSpark outside of our spaces, we still want to know about it. We will take seriously all good-faith reports of harassment by MechaSpark members, especially our Directors and Volunteers. This includes harassment outside our spaces and harassment that occurred at any time. The complaints team reserves the right to exclude people from MechaSpark based on their past behavior, including behavior outside the MechaSpark makerspace and behavior towards people who are not in MechaSpark.

In order to protect volunteers from abuse and burnout, we reserve the right to reject any report we believe in having 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 received harassment complaints or privately warn third parties about them if we believe that doing so will increase the safety of MechaSpark members or the general public. We will not name harassment victims without their affirmative consent.

Consequences

A person asked to stop any harassing behavior is expected to comply immediately.

If a person engages in harassing behavior, the Members & Volunteers group may immediately ban the person from MechaSpark premises and systems. This ban will be in effect until the next scheduled Board meeting, or a special Board meeting addressing the incident as determined by the President of the Board. The Board of Directors will determine the final length of the expulsion upon consulting with the Members & Volunteers group and reviewing the information provided. Harassment victims will not be required to attend this meeting and will not be named without their affirmative consent.

People expelled from MechaSpark by the Board of Directors may be named on our Discord server or our wiki, both of which are publicly available. Additionally, at the discretion of the Board of Directors, we may privately warn third parties (such as conventions, events, and other makerspaces) about the person if we believe that doing so will increase the safety of MechaSpark members or the general public.

Transparency

The Member & Volunteers group will generate a synopsis of actions taken, to be included in the public minutes of each regularly scheduled board meeting, if any are taken. At the team’s discretion, they may post a public announcement when taking an enforcement action. The report and/or announcements will typically be brief and factual, with no extraneous material.

If deemed appropriate, the team may choose to identify the offender by name in these reports. Harassment victims will not be named without their affirmative consent.

This anti-harassement policy is based on the North End Makers policy, which is based on the example policy from the Geek Feminism wiki, created by the Geek Feminism community.