Community Guidelines

Together we are developing a professional online community for the arts and culture sector that reaches across all arts disciplines, organizational forms, and local and national borders. This community is founded on three core values that underpin all NAS programs: respect for individual context, needs, and expertise; openness, honesty, and integrity; and intellectual rigor. We believe that these core values will help create a community that is a dynamic resource for personal and organizational advancement.

While the guidelines for using this community will evolve with the community itself, please follow these rules as you participate in NAS’ online services:

Professional Respect

NAS’ community features are designed for a professional community, and they require mutual respect and trust to succeed. Please act with the same professional respect for others in this online community that guides you in any meeting, conference, or other interaction with your colleagues.

Please treat newcomers with kindness and patience. The community requires the participation of newcomers as well as the contributions of dedicated members, and nothing turns potentially valuable contributors away faster than hostility. While many newcomers hit the ground running, some will need time to learn how we do things. Please provide your friendly advice, and help the community grow. Remember, everyone started as a newcomer at some point.

Debate, strong opinions, and disagreement are a natural part of learning, and we encourage this free exchange of ideas on the NAS site. However, insults, dismissive comments, and other types of abusive speech do not help make a point. Please do not make personal attacks anywhere on the NAS web site. Personal attacks do not help advance an argument, and they deter participation, which hurts the arts and culture sector.

Perfection is an awfully tough standard. People make mistakes, and new features need time to evolve. All that is required for our community to succeed is for everyone to make a good faith effort when you contribute, edit content, answer questions, or interact with the site in other ways. We will all make some mistakes, but as long as we act professionally and in good faith, together we can catch the errors and continuously improve the community.

Usernames and Actual Identities

You have the option of participating in the community using an anonymous screen name or your actual identify to “sign” your online contributions. We encourage you to share your actual identity in the community, to help build a professional network that carries over to all of our interactions in the field. However, we respect any participant’s preference for anonymity, and recognize that anonymity can make it easier to share opinions, and gives you control of when and how you build your personal networks.