When it comes to moderation, my cofounder, Nichole, and I keep a watchful eye to both (1) curb actions that are violations and remove a member if necessary, and (2) redirect and educate if we believe that the person didn’t violate on purpose. Most of the time it’s #2, or at minimum, we come to the table with that framing and then as a last resort remove a member if needed. I have only had to remove 1 person to date out of 150+ members over 4 months of operating. 

We have a few very active members who keep an eye out for us as well. I’ve always emphasized that this is OUR space, and WE ALL are the ones who will set the tone for the kind of environment we want to spend time in. And so I’m very grateful that leaders have organically stepped up to support and to help showcase/embody these values beyond just the two of us. 

All of this has happened pretty organically up to this point. But now, at this size and as we set the groundwork to open up the community to more people, I crafted the more explicit guidelines to provide clarity to the community, to give more members the tools to give us feedback, and to help us see in those corners of the digital space that we can’t attend to ourselves.

This guideline comes from the acknowledgement that the best communities bring together very diverse people and perspectives. We need to be able to talk it out, listen, and respect where everyone is coming from. This is a skill that, in general, needs to be more prevalent in our society. But it also absolutely needs to be part of the way we think about AI and adoption. A great example is that we’ll be holding a community session to unpack the AI executive order together. If you read the headlines and hot takes so far, everyone is coming to the table with a very one-sided “this is going to be terrible for innovation!” or “this only impacts big companies, why sweat it?”, and we know that the EO interpretation can be more gray and nuanced than that. And we want to be able to unpack the various sides of the EO in a grounded way with diverse voices from the community. And that means we cannot be fighting or arguing just to disagree. Instead, we have to assume best intent and be willing to see that many sides of the discussion are true—what can we learn from that, and where do we take action from there?

Assume best intent means a few things that I’ve seen in our community and have done myself. First, it means that if you have beef with someone else in the space because of some action that isn’t a clear violation of the guidelines, our advice is to talk it out. Make sure you understand if that was their intent. Most likely it was not and there was some misunderstanding. It’s like raising kids: our job in this community is to put the guardrails on but not to police. We invite incredible, very senior, very well accomplished leaders in their field, and I want to trust that we can be adults and respect that not everyone is or can be perfect. That has worked really well for us, and encourages an environment of safety and trust and open discourse, that honestly I wish was more true in our nation. 

Second, best intent also means that as the cofounders and admins of the space, we will ALWAYS reach out to an individual first who may have seemingly violated a guideline. I want to make sure that this wasn’t just a misunderstanding of the guideline (in which case this is good info to have, we need to update the guideline for clarity).N


Promotion is a tough one. I do a lot of redirecting. For example, if someone posts in the wrong channel—especially if it’s a “This is me! Do something for me!” kind of post—here’s what I do: 

1) I write back to the poster, share the post I’m referring to, and note that we only do personal promotions in #amplify BECAUSE (and this is important - always articulate the why) we try to keep our main spaces very focused on learn-by-doing & to keep our main channels high signal-to-noise ratio. 

2) I delete the original post, especially if it’s in a big channel like #general.

3) Then I make sure that the original poster knows that they should share in a channel like #amplify so that we, as a community, can support their goals and ambitions. 

I say that handling promotion is hard because most people usually react with something like, “But there are a lot more people in #general than #amplify.” And my follow-up is usually, “Yes, that’s how it’s set up: opt-in versus opt-out.” But also that because our goal IS to amplify the voices of women, if they post in #amplify, we WILL pull that into our weekly community recap and showcase their work pretty loudly and proudly. That helps reframe it from “I’m taking this away from you” to “I’m also giving you this OTHER platform and I promise you more people will pay attention.”

We are still evolving our process here, but at our size right now, it is very much back to “assume best intent” and “if you don’t know, ASK FIRST.” This is particularly important for when individuals share something AND their thoughts on it. If you want to “use their POV” make sure you ask if you can and ask if they want to be cited. 

When we do have more fully formed and expansive content that articulates a perspective that this community owns, we document that, make it public, and cite the contributing members. You can see our first example of that 

. We make it so that if you’re going to use the content, at minimum, you have an easy way to cite both the creator(s) and our organization.

I haven’t encountered an immediate, one-strike removal from the community but here’s an example of where I would: someone is spamming and messaging multiple members of the community over DM (or worse, some weird form of harassment or bullying). I cannot imagine anyone who will do this, but… it’s the internet. 

Another thing that I think about a lot but haven’t encountered yet is how individuals represent themselves and the community externally. We think about this community as part of a broader movement to increase the voices of women in tech. That means the reputation of the Women Defining AI organization externally is pretty important too, especially if you are sitting on a panel and say that you are a member or a foundational advisor of this organization—we want to ensure that you are embodying our community values and ethos.

We’re in the early stages, but our biggest recent step is moving these guidelines from something that was “implicitly known” to “explicitly written down” and it has REALLY helped newer members understand how we operate better. 

I am 1000% sure we will learn more as we continue growing AND have to refine these (though mostly on adjusting what is and isn’t clear versus changing our core values).

Helen Kupp

As we continue to grow our membership at Women Defining AI, it was important to us to present a clear vision of what it means to be a part of our community.

Community Guidelines at Women Defining AI

The main purpose of this community is to learn-by-doing and share openly with each other. 

We are only able to create a valuable and open learning space with all of YOUR help.

You are some of the most incredible women we know, with so much expertise and experience to share with each other. We are only successful if we treat others the way we always want to be treated, but also, if we 

This community’s primary goal is learning, not as a channel to sell services or products. Related, do not share each other’s contact information without asking first!  

We know we all have a range of projects and goals within this community, whether that’s building the next AI company or creating thought leadership outside of this space. We want to balance being your support crew with creating a safe and engaging space, 

so we’ve created channels like #amplify and #events to help you promote your stuff! 

We just ask that you don’t post your services or products into our default or main channels (e.g. 

Do not repost internal community-generated content 

without both checking-in with the person who posted or created it, and ensuring that you credit the member in your external share. If you aren’t sure, just ask!

Being a member of this community means you have access to the private and on-going discourse of various things in the AI/tech world, and the growing set of community-generated resources in our Notion page and Slack channels. Please respect that these are member contributions to this group, and be thoughtful about how to use that (especially externally). 

Community-generated specifically refers to content or thought leadership (like commentary) created by members here

, and does not refer to the articles or links that members are frequently sharing across our channels.

If you see someone violating community guidelines or doing something that feels in violation of the ethos of this community, please report that to @Helen Kupp or @Nichole Sterling over DM. We reserve the right to delete messages, and 

deactivate members whose actions degrade our ability to make this space as open and learning-focused as possible.

anaging a community is hard! And there’s rarely a perfect set of guidelines that will be comprehensive enough

. So, if you have feedback or just aren’t feeling comfortable — DM us to help, talk to each other directly, and know that we’re here to figure this out together.

Scope: This Code of Conduct applies both within project spaces and in public spaces when an individual is representing the project or its community. Examples of this representation include project email addresses, posts via an official social media account, or acting as appointed representative at an online or offline event. Ie, all email, Instragram, LinkedIn communication falls under Code of Conduct, along with other forums where you are representing this community (e.g. conferences and other types of events)!

Community Guidelines at Women Defining AI

Community Guidelines at Women Defining AI

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