FOUNDER FORUM COMMUNITY GUIDELINES

Our mission is to give startup and emerging venture founders the power to build community and share ideas and resources with fellow entrepreneurs. Every day, people come to the VENTAC “Founder Forum” to share their stories, ask questions, post upcoming events, share resources and advice, and see the world through the eyes of others and connect with friends and causes. The conversations that happen on Founder Forum reflect the connections of the VENTAC member community.

We want people to feel safe when using Founder Forum. For that reason, we’ve developed a set of Community Standards, outlined below. These policies will help you understand what type of sharing is allowed on Founder Forum, and what type of content may be reported to us and removed. Sometimes we will allow content if newsworthy, significant or important to the public interest – even if it might otherwise violate our standards. Because of the diversity of our community, please keep in mind that something that may be disagreeable or disturbing to you may not violate our Community Standards.

VENTAC DISCLAIMER OF LIABILITY

Founder Forum is managed by VENTAC, LLC (VENTAC) for use by current VENTAC members only. You agree and understand that VENTAC does not endorse, support, warrant or agree with any facts or opinions posted on the Founder Forum. VENTAC is not responsible for content posted on the Founder Forum. VIEW AND USE THIS INFORMATION AT YOUR OWN RISK.

Helping to Keep You Safe

Overview

We remove content, disable accounts, and work with law enforcement when we believe there is a genuine risk of physical harm or direct threats to public safety. You acknowledge that we will not compensate you and will not undertake any responsibility of your losses as incurred therefrom.

Please note that there may be technological measures in VENTAC that are designed to prevent unlicensed or unauthorized use of Founder Forum or breach of the VENTAC Wed Terms or Terms of Services and Community Standard. You agree that we may use these measures and that you will not seek to disable or circumvent them in any way.

Learn more about how VENTAC handles abusive content.

Be Honest and Safe

All groups and events should be accurately described in the title and description fields to allow members to make informed decisions about their participation.

Organizers must be honest in the way they conduct their events and upfront about the nature of their groups’ activities, interests, membership requirements, intentions, and official organization affiliations.

All events organizers and members must be responsible for their own safety and must never put themselves or others in danger. We expect all events organizers and members to be mindful of local laws when engaging with their members.

When appropriate, VENTAC encourages organizers or group owner to set guidelines for their group or events to ensure their members are participating safely.

Direct Threats: How we help people who feel threatened by others

We do not actively monitor the Founder Forum but will carefully review reports of threatening language to identify serious threats of harm to public and personal safety. We remove credible threats of physical harm to individuals. We also remove specific threats of theft, vandalism, or other financial harm. We may consider things like a person’s public visibility or the likelihood of real world violence in determining whether a threat is credible.

Self-Injury: How we work to help prevent self-injury and suicide.

We don’t allow the promotion of self-injury or suicide. We work with organizations around the world to provide assistance for people in distress. We prohibit content that promotes or encourages suicide or any other type of self-injury, including self-mutilation and eating disorders. We don’t consider body modification to be self-injury. We also remove any content that identifies victims or survivors of self-injury or suicide and targets them for attack, either seriously or humorously. People can, however, share information about self-injury and suicide that does not promote these things.

Dangerous Organizations: What types of organizations or groups we prohibit.

We don’t allow any organizations, groups or individuals that are engaged in the following to have a presence on Founder Forum: 

• Terrorist activity
• Organized violence or criminal activity.
• Mass or serial murderers.
• Organized hate groups.

We also remove content that expresses support for groups that are involved in the violent or criminal behavior mentioned above. Supporting or praising leaders of those same organizations, or condoning their violent activities, is not allowed.

We welcome broad discussion and social commentary on these general subjects but ask that people show sensitivity towards victims of violence and discrimination.

Bullying and Harassment: How we respond to bullying and harassment.

We don’t tolerate bullying or harassment. We allow you to speak freely on matters and people of public interest but remove content that appears to purposefully target private individuals with the intention of degrading or shaming them. This content includes, but is not limited to:

• Pages that identify and shame private individuals.
• Images altered to degrade private individuals.
• Photos or videos of physical bullying posted to shame the victim.
• Repeatedly targeting other people with unwanted friend requests or messages.

We define private individuals as people who have neither gained news attention nor the interest of the public, by way of their actions or public profession.

Criminal Activity: How we handle reports of criminal activity.

We prohibit the use of Founder Forum to facilitate or organize criminal activity that causes physical harm to people, businesses or animals, or financial damage to people or businesses. We work with law enforcement when we believe there is a genuine risk of physical harm or direct threats to public safety.

We also prohibit you from celebrating any crimes. We do, however, allow people to debate or advocate for the legality of criminal activities, as well as address them in a humorous or satirical way.

Attacks on Public Figures: What protection public figures receive.

We permit open and critical discussion of people who are featured in the news or have a large public audience based on their profession or chosen activities. We remove credible threats to public figures, as well as hate speech directed at them – just as we do for private individuals.

Message Respectfully: Don’t Spam Members

Content sent to a member that is irrelevant, impersonal, unsolicited, promotional, or repetitive is spam, and organizers may be blocked for spamming members.

The following are examples of inappropriate spam messages sent by organizers:

• Sending repetitive or unsolicited messages to members who are not in an organizer’s groups.
• Sending messages to an organizer’s own group that do not relate to that group.
• Sending promotional messages, including promoting an organizer’s group to members who are not in that group.
• Abusing the announcement or invite features by repeatedly inviting members or non-members for whom a group may not be relevant.
• Creating groups, events, or accounts for the purpose of cross-promoting.

Regulated Goods

We prohibit any attempts by private individuals to purchase, sell, or trade prescription drugs, marijuana, firearms or ammunition. We don’t permit the individual purchase, sale or trade of firearms or ammunition. Firearm shops and online retailers may promote commercial activity (ex: discussing a gun for sale at their store location) only if they comply with all applicable laws and regulations.

Encouraging respectful behavior

Members use Founder Forum to connect with our community members. This means that you may encounter opinions that are different from yours, which we believe can lead to important conversations about difficult topics. You acknowledge that your speech on Founder Forum represents your personal opinion and you are responsible for that. To help balance the needs, safety, and interests of a diverse community, however, we may remove certain kinds of sensitive content including some inappropriate online speech or limit the audience that sees it. These actions will not represent the views of our opinion.

Hate Speech

• Race.
• Ethnicity.
• National origin.
• Religious affiliation.
• Sexual orientation.
• Sex, gender, or gender identity.
• Serious disabilities or diseases.

Organizations, groups and people dedicated to promoting hatred against these protected groups are not allowed a presence on Founder Forum.

People can use Founder Forum to challenge ideas, institutions, and practices. Such discussion can promote debate and greater understanding. Sometimes people share content containing someone else’s hate speech for the purpose of raising awareness or educating others about that hate speech. When this is the case, we expect people to clearly indicate their purpose, which helps us better understand why they shared that content.

We allow humor, satire, or social commentary related to these topics, and we believe that when people use their authentic identity, they are more responsible when they share this kind of commentary. For that reason, we ask that group administrators associate their name and personal profile with any content that is particularly cruel or insensitive, even if that content does not violate our policies. As always, we urge people to be conscious of their audience when sharing this type of content.

Keeping your account and personal information secure

We work hard to help keep your account secure and protect your personal information. However, you are responsible for safeguarding your account details, including any passwords used to access your account. By joining Founder Forum, you agree to use your authentic name and identity. You may not publish the personal information of others without their consent. When you create a prayer request, you own the full responsibility of the information included in the request. We ask you not to share others or your own private information in prayer requests. We will try our best to improve the performance of our security procedure, but we cannot warrant that the security procedure is 100% accurate due the particularity of the Internet. We shall not undertake any responsibility of your losses as incurred therefrom.

Learn more about how we work to keep your information safe.

Using Your Authentic Identity: How VENTAC’s authentic identity policy creates a safer environment.

People connect on Founder Forum using their authentic identities. When people stand behind their opinions and actions with their authentic name and reputation, our community is more accountable. If we discover that you have multiple personal profiles, we may ask you to close the additional profiles. We also remove any profiles that impersonate other people.

Fraud and Spam: How we protect you from fraud and spam.

We work hard to help ensure that the information you share is secure. We investigate any suspected breach of security. Any attempt to compromise the security of a personal profile, including fraud, may be referred to law enforcement. Using misleading or inaccurate information to artificially collect likes, followers, or shares is not allowed. We also ask that you respect people by not contacting them for commercial purposes without their consent.

Protecting your intellectual property

Founder Forum is a place for you to share the things that are important to you. You own all of the content and information you post on Founder Forum. However, any content you submit, upload, share, transmit or display, through Founder Forum (whether displayed publicly or not, and whether displayed directly or indirectly to any other users), please be sure you have the right to do so and all the content will not infringes our rights or any third party’s rights, including any intellectual property rights, contractual rights, confidentiality rights or privacy rights. We ask that you respect copyrights, trademarks, and other legal rights.

Reporting Abuse

Our community is growing every day and we strive to welcome people to an environment free from abusive content. To do this, we rely on people like you. If you see something on Founder Forum that you believe violates our terms, please report it to us. We have dedicated teams to review things you report to help make sure Founder Forum remains safe.

Please keep the following in mind:

• We may take action any time something violates the Community Standards outlined here.
• We may ask group owners to associate their name and personal profile with a group that contains cruel and insensitive content, even if that content does not violate our policies.
• Reporting something doesn’t guarantee that it will be removed because it may not violate our policies.
• Our content reviewers will look to you for information about why a post may violate our policies. If you report content, please tell us why the content should be removed (e.g., is it nudity or hate speech?) so that we can send it to the right person for review.
• Our review decisions may occasionally change after receiving additional context about specific posts or after seeing new, violating content appearing in a group or a personal profile.
• The number of reports does not impact whether something will be removed. We never remove content simply because it has been reported a number of times.
• The consequences for violating our Community Standards vary depending on the severity of the violation and the person’s history on Founder Forum. For instance, we may warn someone for a first violation, but if we continue to see further violations we may restrict a person’s ability to post on Founder Forum or ban the person from Founder Forum and/or VENTAC.

Not all disagreeable or disturbing content violates our Community Standards. For this reason, we offer you the ability to customize and control what you see by unfollowing, and we encourage you to use this to better personalize your experience. People also often resolve issues they have about a piece of content by simply reaching out to the person who posted it.