Community Guidelines

Welcome! We’re excited you’re here.

Here are some guidelines to ensure we build a safe, welcoming, inclusive and productive community. Please treat this discussion forum with the same respect you would a work environment. We, too, are a shared community resource — a place to share skills, knowledge and interests through ongoing conversation.

These are not hard and fast rules, merely guidelines to aid the human judgment of our community and keep this a friendly and highly-useful community to participate in.

Improve the Discussion

Help us make this a great place for discussion by always working to improve the discussion in some way, however small. If you are not sure your post adds to the conversation, think over what you want to say and try again later. (When building a knowledge repository like this we want to avoid the “I agree!” type of comments, you can love a post to show you appreciate it.)

The topics discussed here matter to our community. Be respectful of the topics and the people discussing them, as it’s likely at time we’re going to wade into politics or disagreements over little things… like the most effective way to creating widespread systemic change :laughing:

One way to improve the discussion is by discovering ones that are already happening. Spend time browsing the topics here before replying or starting your own, as there are a lot of common questions.

Be Agreeable, Even When You Disagree

You may wish to respond to something by disagreeing with it. That’s fine. But remember to criticise ideas, not people. Please avoid:

  • Name-calling
  • Ad hominem attacks
  • Responding to a post’s tone instead of its actual content
  • Knee-jerk contradiction

Instead, provide reasoned counter-arguments that improve the conversation.

Your Participation Counts

The conversations we have here set the tone for every new arrival. Help us influence the future of this community by choosing to engage in discussions that make this forum an interesting place to be!

Discourse (this forum software) provides tools that enable the community to collectively identify the best (and worst) contributions: bookmarks, likes, flags, replies, edits, and so forth. Use these tools to improve your own experience, and everyone else’s, too.

If anyone can build the best online community, it’s a community of like-minded people with a mission to save the world!

If You See a Problem, Flag It

Moderators have special authority; they are responsible for this forum. But so are you. With your help, moderators can be community facilitators, not just janitors or police.

When you see bad behavior, don’t reply. Just flag it. If enough flags accrue, action will be taken, either automatically or by moderator intervention.

In order to maintain our community, moderators reserve the right to remove any content and any user account for any reason at any time. Moderators do not preview new posts; the moderators and site operators take no responsibility for any content posted by the community.

Always Be Civil

Nothing sabotages a healthy conversation like rudeness:

  • Be civil. Don’t post anything that a reasonable person would consider offensive, abusive, or hate speech.
  • Keep it clean. Don’t post anything obscene or sexually explicit.
  • Respect each other. Don’t harass or grief anyone, impersonate people, or expose their private information.
  • Respect our forum. Don’t post spam or otherwise vandalise the forum.

These are not concrete terms with precise definitions — avoid even the appearance of any of these things. This is a public forum, and search engines index these discussions. Keep the language, links, and images safe for family and friends.

Keep It Tidy

This community has the potential to be a HUGE REPOSITORY of valuable information for aspiring, pending and certified B Corps. Make the effort to put things in the right place, so that we can spend more time discussing and less on housekeeping! So:

  • Select the best category area when starting a topic.
  • Don’t cross-post the same thing in multiple topics!
  • Don’t post no-content replies.
  • Don’t divert a topic by changing it midstream, start a new topic so others can find it (see below).
  • Don’t sign your posts — every post has your profile information attached to it. (It gets confusing for others to read.)

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.

Post Only Your Own Stuff

You may not post anything digital that belongs to someone else without permission. You may not post descriptions of, links to, or methods for stealing someone’s intellectual property (software, video, audio, images), or for breaking any other law.

Powered by You

This site is operated by friendly passionate volunteers 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

Yes, legalese is boring, but we must protect ourselves – and by extension, you and your data – against unfriendly folks. We have a Terms of Service describing your (and our) behavior and rights related to content, privacy, and laws. To use this service, you must agree to abide by our TOS.

Thanks for being here and contributing to this community.

Together we can be the change.