Summary

OER and Beyond is a space to build community and conversation around open educational resources, open access, open data, open pedagogy, and more in higher education. The goal of this blog is to encourage our peers to share their work, offer recommended practices, and raise awareness of the important work being done in the open community within higher education. OER and Beyond is dedicated to providing a harassment-free experience for everyone. We do not tolerate harassment of participants in any form.

This code of conduct applies to all OER and Beyond spaces, including our blog and Twitter account, both online and in-person space. Some OER and Beyond-sponsored spaces may have additional guidelines in place, which will be made readily available to participants, who are responsible for knowing and abiding by these rules. Anyone who violates this code of conduct may be sanctioned or expelled from these spaces at the discretion of the OER and Beyond Editorial Team.

Definitions

Harassment includes:

• Offensive comments related to gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, mental illness, neuro(a)typicality, 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’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.
• 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.

The OER and Beyond Editorial Team prioritizes marginalized people’s safety over privileged people’s comfort. The OER and Beyond Editorial Team 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

Reporting

If you are being harassed by a member of OER and Beyond, notice that someone else is being harassed, or have any other concerns, please contact the OER and Beyond Editorial Team at oerandbeyond@gmail.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. We will follow the best practices as laid out in Geek Feminism’s Conference anti-harassment/Responding to reports.

This code of conduct applies to OER and Beyond spaces, but if you are being harassed by a member of OER and Beyond outside our spaces, we still want to know about it. We will take all good-faith reports of harassment by OER and Beyond members, especially the Editorial Team, seriously. This includes harassment outside our spaces and harassment that took place at any point in time. The Editorial Team reserves the right to exclude people from OER and Beyond based on their past behavior, including behavior outside OER and Beyond spaces and behavior towards people who are not in OER and Beyond.

In order to protect volunteers 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.

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’ve received harassment complaints, or privately warn third parties about them, if we believe that doing so will increase the safety of OER and Beyond members or the general public. We will not name harassment victims without their affirmative consent.

Consequences

Participants asked to stop any harassing behavior are expected to comply immediately.

If a participant engages in harassing behavior, the OER and Beyond Editorial Team may take any action they deem appropriate, up to and including expulsion from all OER and Beyond spaces and identification of the participant as a harasser to other OER and Beyond members or the general public.

Comment Policy

OER and Beyond appreciates and invites your comments on the content we publish. The goal of our blog is to start conversations with people engaged in this work across institutions and located in places all over the world. However, we do expect our readers to provide comments that are either constructive criticism, support, or ask questions to the writer or other commenters to clarify or expand on their content. Any comments that violate our Code of Conduct, disregard the article’s topic, attack our writer, or fail to add to the ongoing discussion will be deleted and not approved for the website.

All content posted on OER and Beyond (except where otherwise noted) is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license, including comments added to the articles. As such, all comments may be archived along with the articles they accompany for the purposes of the author’s record of publication.

License and attribution

This policy is licensed under the Creative Commons Zero license. It is public domain; no credit and no open licensing of your version is required.

This policy is based on the Code of Conduct at In The Library With The Lead Pipe as well as an example policy from the Geek Feminism wiki, created by the Geek Feminism community.