Community Guidelines

This is a space to support one another with challenging organisational questions and problems

Please treat this discussion forum with the same respect you would your local community centre. The RadHR Community is a shared resource—a place to share skills, knowledge and interests through ongoing conversation.

These are not hard and fast rules. They are guidelines to aid one another’s judgement and keep this a kind, friendly place to learn and grow together.

Grow the collective brain of the RadHR Community!

Help make this a great place for discussion by actively adding something constructive to the discussion, however small.

One way to improve the discussion is by discovering conversations that are already happening and getting involved in them. Spend time browsing the topics here before replying or starting your own, and you’ll have a better chance of meeting others who share your interests.

This work matters deeply to all of us. Our ideas and assumptions may not always be perfectly aligned, but we can try our best to read one another’s contributions in good faith, even when we might disagree with some of what is being said.

Don’t be a dick!

We don’t want to dwell on this stuff because we believe in our community to handle itself well, but we need to say it somewhere, in case things go wrong.

We will disagree with each other here. That’s fine. It’s an important part of any community. But we can disagree with one another’s ideas, without resorting to personal attacks. We can also respect the community by making sure our posts are relevant and respectful, and don’t undermine other members’ safety or privacy.

Please avoid:

  • Name-calling (generally not helpful)
  • Any kind of hate speech or sexually explicit content (if it’s likely to be offensive or abusive, moderators will take it down)
  • Ad hominem attacks (focused on the person, rather than the content of their argument)
  • Harassing anyone, impersonating people, or exposing their private information (there will be minimal moderator tolerance for activities that put anyone else at risk)
  • Posting irrelevant publicity materials (i.e. spam) that are not related to the forum topics
  • Posting content that you don’t have the right to post (if someone shared a policy with you in confidence, it’s best to keep it in confidence, or ask if you want to put it here)

If flagged by other members of the community, these kinds of messages may lead to community moderation steps being taken by moderators.

We all shape the culture of the RadHR Community

The conversations we have here set the tone that every new member experiences when they join. Help us influence the future of this community by choosing to engage in ways that make this forum a welcoming and generative space to be a part of.

We try to provide tools that enable the community to collectively identify what’s helpful and what’s harmful : bookmarks, likes, flags, replies, edits, watching, muting and so forth. You can use these tools to improve your own experience, and everyone else’s, too.

It’s up to all of us to say when something isn’t right

Moderators have a particular responsibility for this forum. But so do you. With your help, moderators can be community facilitators, making sure that our discussions here are as reflective of our values as the policies we’re talking about.

If someone is trolling you or others, or acting in a really unfair or abusive manner, don’t reply. Replying encourages that sort of behaviour by acknowledging it, consumes your energy, and wastes everyone’s time. Just flag it. If something is flagged, moderators will look at it and if it seems at odds with our community standards, action will be taken.

We know that in general people don’t mean to make others feel bad, or threatened. So our moderation policy involves not assuming the worst in people. We always start by talking to people if they are acting in ways that make anyone else feel uncomfortable. But, in order to maintain our community, moderators may remove any content and any user account, if other steps have not succeeded in shifting a member’s online behaviour. Moderators will do our best to intervene if something has been posted that is out of line, but we can’t be on top of every post, all the time, so cannot take responsibility for the content posted by the community.

Keep it tidy

While categorisation is never a perfect science, do your best to put posts and comments in the appropriate places. Some things to be aware of are:

  • Starting a topic in the wrong category; please read the category definitions.
  • Cross-posting the same thing in multiple topics; this clutters up the feeds, so try to do so selectively.
  • Diverting a topic by changing it midstream; there will be other threads where you can post in - or if not, you can create one.

Rather than posting “+1” or “Agreed”, use the Like button. Rather than taking an existing topic in a radically different direction, use Reply as a Linked Topic.

Powered by all of us

The RadHR Community is operated by a small, part-time staff team and you, the community. If you have any further questions about how things should work here, open a new topic in the site feedback category and let’s discuss! If there’s a critical or urgent issue that can’t be handled by a meta topic or flag, contact us via the staff page.

Terms of Service

We have a Terms of Service describing your (and our) behaviour and rights related to content, privacy, and laws. This is to protect ourselves—and by extension, you and your data—against unfriendly folks. To use this community, you must agree to abide by our Terms of Service.