Community Agreements

Our intentions

We share this digital space to promote scholarship that we believe has value, from people who are valuable and have important ideas that need to be shared within and beyond academic institutions. 

Poly Publishing intends to share scholarship produced through the guidance of being transparent, accessible, and accountable to the local communities and important networks. Through the process outlined, we hope to shift publishing structures to include immersive, interactive systems that focus on collaboration, acknowledgements, and equitable practices. 

We are on the Indigenous lands of yak titʸu titʸu yak tiłhini, the Northern Chumash tribe. We are using the internet, that may not be available in many Indigenous communities, which adds to the materiality of a digital divide. We must keep in mind the systemic violence that has brought us to be a part of the institutions that we find ourselves working in, and continue working to not only start conversations to acknowledge and understand the systems, but change them. 

Our Agreements

Under the ethics of care and recentering humanity in scholarship, we hope to bring together viewers to access, process, and share the stories being told in Cal Poly’s Poly Publishing Program. 

Each project may have more specific community agreements, brought together from the creators of the project. In general, the Poly Publishing Program upholds these agreements: 

  • Each individual contributes from their own positionality, and should consider the impact of their actions or words. This includes using references of theories, concepts, terms, and general language. 
  • Together we hold generous accountability with each other: we are active in being present, in open listening, and accepting responsibility for beyond binaries of good or bad. 
  • We pay attention to taking space and making space. This includes making space for subjective ideas, such as emotion, and past experiences. 

Within this system of sharing knowledge, we do not condone harassment, specifically within the boundaries of racism, ableism, sexism, transphobia, homophobia, classism, nationalism, ageism, or marital status. While we acknowledge and understand that these oppressions have shaped the society’s structures and may not even be visible in menial comments or actions, we ask that everyone who visits this site keep in mind the inequities that each person may grapple with on a daily basis. We are striving for a community, and this requires supportive, (even when critical) open, thoughtful engagement. 

If there are any concerns, please email jpding@calpoly.edu or lib-creativeworks@calpoly.edu. Concerns may be confidential. 

This also includes the ideas of ownership within our community: we are co-operational, which means that we are all part of adding, critically analyzing, learning, and sharing the knowledge that we are handling. 

We use Creative Commons in licensing, though we acknowledge that this system in itself is not conducive to practices that are equitable; copyright is, in itself, a form of capitalism. That being said, we wish for producers of scholarship (including the design, illustrative, and motion based forms of scholarship) retain the rights to their work. We try to work towards this belief, but with the understanding that this will not be true for all persons involved. 

 

This is a living document, and has been written and last updated by jaime ding in july, 2020. 

 

References

The following Codes of Conduct, Community Guidelines, and Community Care statements have influenced, provoked, and guided our community agreements.