Code of conduct

The short version

1. Sitting C-level executives, or the equivalent scope under a different title.
2. Nobody sells. Pitching the group is the one way to lose your membership.
3. Off the record. What is said here does not leave with a name attached.
4. Handicap optional. Interest in the game is not.
5. No competitively sensitive information. Ever. See section 4.
6. Act like a peer. Respect, discretion, and good faith are the entry fee.

Contents

1. 1. Membership and standing
2. 2. Nobody sells
3. 3. Off the record
4. 4. Material non-public information
5. 5. Third-party and regulated data
6. 6. Respect
7. 7. Member privacy
8. 8. Be real
9. 9. Direct messages
10. 10. Reporting and enforcement
11. 11. What admins can see
12. 12. Changes

1. Membership and standing

• Membership is individual, not institutional. Your seat is yours, not your company's. It does not transfer to a successor, a chief of staff, or a direct report.
• Members must hold a sitting C-level role or equivalent executive scope. Admins verify at admission.
• If you change roles, tell an admin. Between roles, your seat stays. A move into a vendor sales, business development, or investor-facing role triggers a review under section 2.
• No proxies, no shared accounts, no delegated access. You post as you.
• Guests, Slack Connect channels, and external app installs are off by default. Admins approve exceptions individually.

2. Nobody sells

The single fastest way out of this group.

• No pitching, no demos, no discovery calls disguised as questions, no unsolicited commercial DMs, no recruiting a member into your pipeline.
• Do not use the membership roster as a lead list, and do not export or reconstruct it.
• If you have a genuine commercial interest in a thread, disclose it in the thread and stop there. Disclosure buys you honesty, not a pitch.
• Recommending a product you actually use is fine. Recommending a product you sell, invest in, advise, or sit on the board of requires you to say so in the same message.
• Vendor-side executives, if admitted at all, are admitted as peers and are held to this section without exception.

3. Off the record

The default is the Chatham House Rule: you may use what you learn here, but you may not attribute it to a person or their employer.

• Do not screenshot, forward, quote, or paste content out of this workspace with names or company names attached.
• Do not feed workspace content to external AI assistants, notetakers, transcription bots, or summarizers. No automated capture of any kind.
• No press. If you are a journalist or analyst, you are not a member. If you are talking to press about a topic discussed here, the source is you, not this group.
• Sharing content out of a private channel requires the author's explicit consent.

Nobody has signed an NDA. Treat this as a room with good manners, not a vault: assume anything you type could be exported by Slack tooling or repeated by a person who forgets themselves. Post accordingly.

4. Material non-public information

Members may work at public companies or companies in process. Do not disclose or solicit MNPI: unannounced results, deals, restructurings, breaches, or leadership changes. If you would need a Reg FD disclosure to say it on a call, do not type it here. If you receive MNPI here, you are on the hook for it. Tell an admin and stop the thread.

5. Third-party and regulated data

Do not post customer, employee, patient, or client data. That includes PII, PHI, cardholder data, credentials, keys, incident artifacts, logs with identifiers, or anything under an NDA you signed. Sanitize before you share. Incidents and postmortems are welcome; identifiable victims are not.

6. Respect

Treat every member with dignity and good faith regardless of gender or gender identity, sexual orientation, age, disability, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion or lack of one, language, or background.

Not acceptable, in channels or DMs: harassment of any kind, sexual language or imagery, demeaning or discriminatory commentary, hate speech, deliberate intimidation, stalking, unwelcome contact after being asked to stop, or advocating for any of it. If someone tells you a behavior is unwelcome, the conversation is over. Stop, and do not litigate it.

Disagree hard on substance. Never on the person. Seniority is not standing to talk down to anyone here.

7. Member privacy

Do not disclose another member's personal information without their consent, even if it is findable elsewhere: home address, personal phone, family, relationships, compensation, employer or real name if not in their profile, or any personal characteristic they have not stated themselves.

8. Be real

No impersonation, no fake accounts, no representing a company you do not work for, no astroturfing a product conversation as a customer. This is a terminal offense, and it reflects on anyone who vouched for you.

9. Direct messages

The Code applies in DMs. Admins cannot read them, which makes self-policing the only control. Before DMing a member you have never spoken with: make the reason obvious, keep it to one message, and accept silence as an answer. Unsolicited DMs with a commercial edge are a section 2 violation.

10. Reporting and enforcement

• Report anything concerning to an admin by DM. Reports are handled discreetly, and you will never be asked to justify why you did not confront someone directly.
• Handle minor friction peer-to-peer where you can. Point at the relevant section, once, without commentary, then let it go. If it needs more than that, it needs an admin.
• Admins may delete content, issue a private warning, suspend, or remove a member. Warnings are recorded internally.
• Everything else follows a warn-and-correct path. Removal is the last resort, not the first.
• An admin who is party to a dispute recuses themselves entirely and discloses the conflict immediately.
• Admins are members too. Outside of running this workspace, their opinions are their own.

Immediate removal, no warning: selling after a warning, breaking section 3 attribution, a section 4 violation, impersonation, or harassment.

11. What admins can see

Admins can see member email addresses, join requests, profile data, and Slack access logs. They cannot see private channels they are not in, and cannot read DMs. The workspace owner account has export capability that can reach private content; it is used only for a documented Code investigation. Message retention is indefinite. Using any of this access for anything other than administration is itself a violation.

12. Changes

Admins may amend this document. Material changes are announced in the workspace with a summary of what changed. Send proposals to an admin. This is a peer group, and the rules should read like the members wrote them.