Code of Conduct

Muslim Professional Network

Last updated 08/25/2022

Our commitment to members

We want everyone to feel welcome and safe in the Muslim Professional Network community regardless of gender, gender identity and expression, age, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, ethnicity, religious beliefs, political stance, or technology choices.

Accordingly, we will not tolerate harassment of our members in any form; not on Slack, not on Twitter or other online channels, and not in person at email industry events or otherwise.

What constitutes harassment?

Harassment includes invasion of personal space, exclusionary jokes and comments, and sexual language and imagery — but this list is non-exhaustive. If you make anyone feel uncomfortable or unwelcome, you will be asked to leave. If someone feels harassed or excluded by your words or actions, those words or actions constitute harassment or exclusion. Your intent is not a factor. All Muslim Professional Network Slack participants are accountable for their own behavior. If you’ve behaved badly elsewhere, that may count against you here because of the effect it has on other members.

What about “trolling”?

Posting messages to provoke controversy or emotional response — whether for amusement or another motivation — will not be tolerated. Our #random channel is off-topic by design, but should remain positive and not polarizing.

Chatham House Rule

All members must adhere to the Chatham House Rule:When a meeting, or part thereof, is held under the Chatham House Rule, participants are free to use the information received, but neither the identity nor the affiliation of the speaker(s), nor that of any other participant, may be revealed.What this means in practice is that no identifying personal or company information leaves the Slack group — not for an article, not for sales, nor any other reason. (The sole exception is if you ask for and receive explicit permission from each person involved.) While our community is semi-public, this rule allows our members to share a little more freely and openly. Can I post about my webinar, conference, tradeshow, etc.?If you're hosting a conference or webinar or similar, you're welcome to post once per event about it in #email-events, but please refrain from repeated posts about the same event unless asked specific follow-up questions.

Are there any other don’ts?

As we are an industry-focused community, many of our members have a strong business interest behind their participation. This is okay as long as you are transparent about your affiliations and motives. Our members are often supportive of business-related or promotional messages if the people behind them are also general contributors to the community.

However, to protect both our members’ experiences and our community’s reputation, we do have a few rules:

Don’t send unsolicited direct messages for sales, marketing, research, or other business purposes

DM as you’d email: without spamming

If there’s a message you want to send to multiple people, find the most appropriate channel and post there instead

Don’t post about a company, product, or service to which you have an undisclosed affiliation or business relationship

For a custom emoji of your company’s logo to use as your “Slack status”, please message admin Zohaib Rattu

Don’t post undisclosed referral links

Referrals are fine as long as you make it clear what people are clicking

Don’t spam our community with links or content

Share to be helpful, not promotional;

Muslim Professional Network is not a marketing channel

Factors like not participating aside from posting links or including tracking parameters on URLs may lead to messages or users being removed

Anyone may post promotional messages and links in #shamelessplugs

Don’t respond to a post unthreaded

Threads allow the community to be much easier to navigate for those who are new or simply pop in from time to time.

So if you are looking to respond to a post, leave your response in a thread. Very few exceptions to this rule exist; you’ll know them when you see them.

Don’t be repetitive

Posting the same question or information in multiple channels causes separate conversations to occur instead of one holistic discussion. Keep it in one place.

Don’t post un-constructive criticism

Conversation around the work, tools, and companies of members and non-members is fine, but keep it constructive and refrain from piling on; you never know who is reading

Consider taking your criticism to the relevant person or company privately

Don’t distribute material without authorization

This includes links, text, and images of content like reports, webinars, and white papers that may be paid, exclusive to members of an organisation, or behind an email signupDon’t impersonate peopleIll-intended or not, changing your name and/or photo to replicate someone else’s likeness can be confusing for othersDon’t scrape or automate anything to do with our member list or messages for any reason, personal or professionalWe’re a community, not a database

Don’t “brigade” to or from our community (send people to comment/vote/etc. for a particular interest)

Don’t ask for a channel for your company

To reiterate an above point, Muslim Professional Network is not a marketing channel; existing #shamelessplugs have been created to bring users together and may or may not include employee representatives

Vendors are strongly encouraged to not use our platform (channels or DMs) for customer communication or support

The admin team will identify needs for new channels as conversation around topics becomes overwhelming in existing channels; this is the only way new channels will be created

Existing channels will be removed as they become insufficiently active

Don’t ask to collect data or information from the community without sharing your results freely and openly

Requests for people to complete surveys, questionnaires, share experiences, etc. with the intention of turning the answers into “content” are discouragedAny such requests that don’t make it explicit that resulting data and any analysis will be shared back to Muslim Professional Network as a Slack message, attachment, or freely and openly accessible URL will be removed

The above includes any signup wall, paywall, email address entry, event or webinar signup, etc. that would add friction to members accessing the information or content they made possible

How you can report an incident


If you feel that someone has violated this code of conduct or has otherwise acted inappropriately, please contact a member of the admin team as soon as possible. The admin team currently consists of Zohaib Rattu, Hana Rasheed, Khaliq Rahman, Muhammad Junaid, Madiha Saeed, Maryam Imam, and Tariq Ali.

All messages and conversations are assumed to be sent in confidence unless otherwise agreed, though they can and will be discussed privately by the admin team. If an incident warrants transparency in public community channels, the reporting member has a right to anonymity unless waived. Steps the admin team may takeIf a participant engages in behavior that violates this code of conduct, the admin team may take any action they deem appropriate, including warning the offender or removing them from the group. About this document The first draft of this document was written by Zohaib rattu, drawing on a number of sources and input from members of the Muslim Professional Network Slack community.

How you can contribute or suggest changes

Contributions and discussion about this document are very welcome. You can participate in a few different ways:

By raising a discussion in the Slack community itself

By privately contacting a member of the admin team

All suggestions can and will be discussed by members of the community before being incorporated into this document.