Code of conduct

NZ Tech Rally 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 NZ Tech Rally spaces, including our online and offline conferences, meetups, and communities. Anyone who violates this code of conduct may be sanctioned or expelled from these spaces at the discretion of NZ Tech Rally.

Some NZ Tech Rally spaces may have additional rules, which will be made available to participants. Participants are responsible for knowing and abiding by these rules.

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 and simulated physical contact 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.
• Patterns 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.
• Photographing/filming/recording people without their explicit permission. (E.g. YouTubing and live streaming event without asking people or not blurring their faces out)

NZ Tech Rally prioritizes marginalized people’s safety over privileged people’s comfort. NZ Tech Rally 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 behaviour or assumptions

If you are being harassed, notice that someone else is being harassed, or have any other concerns, please contact a director of NZ Tech Rally (Prae Songprasit, Camy Bhandari, Aaron Hodder) directly or email info@nztechrally.nz. If the person harassing you is on the crew, they will recuse themselves from handling your incident. We will respond as promptly as we can.

This code of conduct applies to NZ Tech Rally spaces, but if you are being harassed by a member of NZ Tech Rally outside our spaces, we still want to know about it. We will take all good-faith reports of harassment by NZ Tech Rally members, especially volunteers and leadership crew, seriously. This includes harassment outside our spaces and harassment that occurred at any time. The abuse team reserves the right to exclude people from NZ Tech Rally based on their past behaviour, including behaviour outside NZ Tech Rally spaces and behaviour towards people not in NZ Tech Rally.

To protect volunteers from abuse and burnout, we reserve the right to reject any report we believe was made in bad faith. Reports intended to silence legitimate criticism may be deleted without response.

We will respect confidentiality requests to protect 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 NZ Tech Rally members or the general public. We will not name harassment victims without their affirmative consent.

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

If a participant engages in harassing behaviour, NZ Tech Rally may take any action they deem appropriate, up to and including expulsion from all NZ Tech Rally spaces and identification of the participant as a harasser to other NZ Tech Rally members or the general public.