Joining the Community
We are thrilled you have decided to join our data community. We have a growing Slack community where current and aspiring analytics leaders discuss and share lessons and challenges from their experience working with data. It’s a great place to start building your brain trust!
If you have not already, please reach out to ask for an invite to our Slack group. In your email, please tell us a little bit about yourself and why you’re interested in joining our data community.
Participating in the Slack Community
In general, we trust that the Locally Optimistic community will behave in ways that they believe are appropriate. The guidelines below are intended to help steer you in the right direction and to promote organic growth and discussion.
Everyone
- Read our code of conduct. We expect everyone to adhere to these requirements and we will not tolerate harassment or intolerant behavior.
- Enter your full name (this community will work best if we are all real humans), but feel free to add a custom “display name”
- Add a headline in the “what I do” box (can be “title @ company” or anything that helps people know who they are chatting with)
- Add a profile photo
- Introduce yourself in the #introductions channel
Vendors
We appreciate having individuals who build and sell data tools as part of our community. It’s incredibly valuable for our data community both to find about new tools and solutions, and to be able to provide feedback that helps shape those tools to really solve their problems. We want folks contributing to our discussions and engaging, regardless of their employer, but also to ensure that LO is still primarily a place where discussions do not begin with a vendor agenda – so we have specific guidelines for our members who represent data vendors.
What is a vendor?
- We use “vendor” as shorthand to refer to community members who represent a company that sells products and/or services primarily to data teams or data team members. Regardless of your role within the company, please err on the side of being overly cautious when it comes to your approach to communicating about your own tool or direct competitors.
- Vendors include employees of SaaS companies, consultants, freelancers, open source maintainers seeking users or contributors, and investors in the data space.
- A vendor is still a community member. We hope that you feel empowered to fully engage with the community, while remaining thoughtful about how you handle conversations about your own tool or competitors.
Do:
- Keep the tone civil, always.
- Note your vendor affiliation in your Slack Full Name (e.g. Jane Doe @ Vendor Co.) so that those reading your commentary can understand your potentially biased position. If in doubt about whether you represent a vendor, err on the side of transparency.
- When a community member mentions a problem that your product could help with, wait at least one full business day for the community to discuss and offer opinions before hopping in to introduce yourself and your tool.
- Feel empowered to create #tools-toolname channel and announce it once in #discussion to allow interested users to opt into conversation related to your tool. We appreciate publicly searchable conversation, so this is preferable to having one-off conversations in DMs.
- Share content and events freely in #vendor-content.
Don’t:
- Directly private-message someone about your product (including consulting or staffing services) without being asked, or without consent on a public post.
- Contact someone outside of the Slack channel (e.g., handing their contact info to your sales team).
- Comment on a competitors’ technology aside from comparing specific nuances and differences. Simply saying “alpha is bad” or “gamma is better” would violate this guideline
- If content includes a call to action to check out your company’s products or services or is hosted on a vendor website, it belongs in the #vendor-content channel or (where appropriate) the specific #tools-channel.
- Promote your own product outside #vendor-content or your specific #tools- channel unless a community member has asked a question directly about it. If someone asks what tools solve a certain problem, a vendor could say “the big three service providers are alpha, beta, and gamma — I work at gamma so I’m biased toward that one. If you want to discuss more about the details, hope into #tools-toolname.” Do not simply post “you should check out gamma”. Though of course this should be posted after one full business day (see rule above).
Solicitation
This community is built for data practitioners to discuss the work that they do, the ideas that they have, and the things that they are learning. It is not intended for vendors, recruiters, investors, or other commercial users to generate leads or harvest ideas. It is not appropriate to directly reach out to community members to
- recruit them for a role,
- sell them your product,
- request feedback or user research participation,
- explore investment opportunities,
- or otherwise ask a community member for information, time, attention, or money in order to materially benefit your company, portfolio company, or open source project.
Recruiters, you may post a JD in the #job-postings channel and invite interested candidates to reach out to you directly. Vendors, investors, and open source maintainers, you can make any of the above requests generally in #vendor-content. We believe you can bring enormous value to LO and we encourage you to engage with the community, but we will remove users who solicit from the community. Please keep it in public channels and ensure you have public consent before reaching out to anyone via DM.
Reach Out to the Admins
If you observe anyone violating these rules or guidelines (or you just see something that makes you uncomfortable or you believe is hurting the community) please reach out to an admin (@scott, @michael, @ilan, @caitlin moorman, @emilie, or @brittany rosenau) and we’ll address it. You can also send us an email. And, of course, we expect that we will need to continuously evolve as a community, so joining the #communityrules channel is a great place to participate if you have thoughts on how we can make the community better.