(December 2, 2023 / @royrapoport)
As the CoC for RLS indicates, RLS has a pretty significant allergy to activity considered to be ‘commercial activity’. However, as the CoC is relatively succinct, there’s not a lot of guidance as to how to think about "what commercial activity is," and how it will likely be received. As a result, at some regular frequency we get into conversations in either #rls-rules or #rls-culture about whether or not some already-done or considered activity would be commercial.
Some of these conversations (particularly this one and this one) have been useful for me to better understand the perspective of the community, and at some point I volunteered to try to write up a document that would capture our thoughts about commercial activity in a more conversational and explanatory way for other people that would allow them to understand how we think about this without having to trawl through many different threads.
The goal of this document is to describe the current state of the art for how we think about this, rather than to advocate for a change in how we think about this, so if you read this and it strikes you as not representing our current stance, it’s flawed and should be corrected.
One area where we’ve seen lack of clarity is what "commercial" means in this context. The most obvious and direct example of this is when you are, say, the owner of a business and you’re trying to have members of this Slack pay your business for services or product.
In order to think better about what’s likely to be considered to be "commercial" or market research, one question you might ask yourself is:
Am I engaging with the people in this Slack as peers/partners, or am I engaging with them as prospective customers?
If you’re asking the sort of question you might be asking from the customers of a given product you provide — whether the product is for-pay, freemium, ad-supported, or even open-source software — it’s likely that it’ll be considered commercial activity.
For example, imagine you want to release an open-source library to do date manipulation in Python. Asking this Slack in non-commercial-activity channels (e.g. #python ) "hey, I’m thinking of releasing a new open-source date manipulation library in Python, what would you want from that?" is essentially a question to the potential customers of this library — it’s a fundamental PMF (Product Market Fit) investigation, and as such is commercial. At the same time, asking in #python "hey, I’m thinking of releasing an open-source library in Python, what’s the state of the art for releasing and distributing libraries in Python these days?" is a question you’d not be asking of customers, but rather peers, and as such is unlikely to be seen as commercial activity.
As this example demonstrates, our concern about market-research/commercial activities extend not just to products offered as part of a remunerated exchange (i.e. money is changing hands) but covers any product offered to people outside your organization, whether it’s offered for money, is ad-supported, or entirely open-source.
Another complication can occur if you are marketing yourself as being knowledgeable in a given field, and you’re asking for others’ help to collect information which you will then essentially implicitly resell through speaking or consulting engagements. This is a situation likely to trigger an allergic response. This is a situation where — because the context matters — you may find that the same question from two different people will land very differently.
For example, if a random engineering manager posts a question in #adhd along the lines of "I have a direct report who has shared an ADHD diagnosis with me, and has asked me for some specific accommodations ... how have you approached that?" this is likely to land well and not result in an allergic response. However, if you advertise yourself as a consultant focusing on helping employers support neurodivergent employees and post a question in #adhd along the lines of "how do you approach neurodivergent employees who ask for accommodations?" this will quite likely trigger an allergic response because it will feel like you’re essentially crowd-sourcing information which you are then reusing to generate your own income.
Similarly to ‘When the Product Is You’, if you’re seeking help on creating some sort of artifact — a conference presentation, say, or a blog post — on a topic and you’re asking for experts to help you with content for this artifact, this will likely trigger an allergic response, and you should avoid doing so in channels that do not support commercial activity.
Much like the example in When the Product Is You, an allergic response would likely occur if you were saying "I’ve been invited to present at a conference on supporting neurodivergent employees, how do you approach that?" because the goal here is essentially at least somewhat going to be seen as improving your marketability, rather than helping you manage your employees better. A similar thing would likely occur if you were trying to write an article for which you were getting paid (either as part of an FTE role or on a per-article basis), irrespective of whether you were looking to repackage opinions/information from others or if you were looking for experts to quote in your article. Whether you’re planning to cite and attribute your sources or not, this will likely come across as commercial activity.
Roughly speaking, the more directly you benefit from your employer gaining an additional customer the more messages that may look like you’re soliciting business are likely to trigger an allergic response. It’s a little bit like this:
Least danger: You’re, say, an engineer working for Disney+. Disney+ has 150M subscribers and another ten or even a thousand aren’t really going to impact its bottom line, and you certainly won’t be getting paid more if Disney+ gets another thousand subscribers. You posting in #movies-and-tv "Oh my gosh, Encanto is on Disney+ now, I watched it and it’s amazing, definitely check it out!" is very unlikely to come across as commercial activity. It’s just not going to make sense that you’re doing that because you’re trying to juice Disney+‘s numbers.
Most danger: You’re an independent consultant, and you’re posting in a given channel "hey y’all, I’ve got some free time, hire me!" In this case it’s both the case that each customer meaningfully changes your bottom line (since you likely have a few, or at most dozens of, customers) and that the ‘company bottom line’ is indistinguishable from what ends up in your pocket (since as a sole proprietorship your role in your company is like Fezzik’s role in the Brute Squad).
How people read your messages will happen in context of their understanding of your participation in this Slack. This means that the more people see you as being here and primarily contributing to the conversations we want to see on this Slack — the more people see you as actually contributing to this slack — the less likely they’re going to be to assume you’re here to leech value out of it, and the more likely you will be to be able to post something that, were it to come from a newcomer, would be flagged as potentially commercial; similarly, the more you have a track record of contribution, the more likely that people’s engagement with potentially commercial activity will be a more curious "hmm, I wonder if this is commercial?" rather than a strong "hey, no, that’s not cool, take it off."
This does not — should not — mean that if you’re a prolific contributor to this Slack you get carte blanche to post commercial content, but within a pretty wide gray window how your message lands will be dependent on your previous contributions, which is a good reason to, once you arrive at this Slack, focus on contributing value to the Slack in a way that isn’t likely to come across as commercial for a while.
There’s a reason this document was written — as noted above, we’ve had a bunch of conversations on this topic and it’s a topic full of gray areas and ambiguity. If you’re reading this doc because someone pointed it at you because you posted something that someone thought was commercial, and you’re feeling bad because you didn’t think it was commercial, don’t worry about it — it’s happened to all of us, and nobody is going to hold that sort of mistake against you. It’s an ongoing process of education and acclimatization.
In putting this together, I relied on a whole lot of chatter in #rls-culture and some meaningful investment other people made in laying out a cogent explanation of what comes across as commercial. While many people made such investments, I want to particularly note @nadyne @matt.schellhas and @George Stocker as people who have consistently put in valiant efforts to help others understand our stance. Their description of this stance was incredibly helpful in my own education.