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GILD membership

Member code of conduct

Forums work because people can speak candidly. These are the rules that protect that, and what happens when someone breaks them.

  1. Participate as a peer

    GILD is not a prospecting room. Members may naturally discuss their work, companies, expertise, products, services, and opportunities when relevant, and normal professional relationship-building is encouraged.

    Members must not aggressively solicit, repeatedly pitch, spam, pressure, or dominate other participants for commercial purposes. They must not turn a private discussion into an unsolicited sales presentation, product demo, recruiting campaign, fundraising pitch, or commercial takeover.

    Members must not pressure participants for meetings, purchases, introductions, contact information, investments, employment decisions, or other commitments, or use GILD participation primarily to harvest leads or target people they did not meaningfully engage with.

  2. Protect private discussions

    Private GILD discussions are intended to support candid exchange. Members may use ideas, lessons, and themes learned through GILD when the source is genuinely anonymized and cannot reasonably be identified, or when the relevant person has given permission for attribution.

    Without permission, Members may not publish or repeat direct quotations, identify a speaker or organization behind a private remark, expose another participant's non-public challenge, strategy, buying need, project, internal initiative, personnel matter, or other sensitive information in identifiable form, or share non-public GILD content outside the permitted context.

    Members remain free to discuss their own statements and information they are independently authorized to disclose.

  3. No unauthorized recording or capture

    Members may not record audio or video of private GILD discussions, create automated transcripts, use meeting bots or AI transcription tools, or otherwise capture private conversations without GILD's express approval.

    GILD-approved event photography or video may occur for documentation and marketing, subject to GILD's event practices. This does not authorize Members to record private discussions themselves.

  4. Use participant information responsibly

    GILD may provide or display limited professional information to support event preparation, community participation, and relationship-building. Members may not scrape, sell, redistribute, bulk-enrich, or convert non-public GILD participant information into cold-outbound, automated marketing, recruiting, advertising, retargeting, or similar lists.

    Natural follow-up with people a Member genuinely met or interacted with is permitted, subject to applicable law and the recipient's preferences. A participant's attendance, question, conversation, introduction request, or private comment must not be represented as purchasing intent, endorsement, or permission for unrelated outreach.

  5. Professional conduct and GILD authority

    Members must behave professionally and respectfully toward other participants, GILD personnel, venue staff, vendors, and guests.

    Harassment, discrimination, threats, intimidation, bullying, abusive or unlawful conduct, physical aggression, material safety risks, materially intoxicated or disorderly behavior that interferes with others, fraud, deliberate deception, impersonation, material misrepresentation, and retaliation for raising a concern are prohibited.

    GILD retains final authority over attendance, room composition, seating, programming, timing, community participation, photography, introductions, safety, and other operational elements of GILD experiences. Members must follow reasonable GILD instructions intended to protect the experience and this Code.

  6. Enforcement

    GILD may respond proportionally to a violation based on seriousness, frequency, intent, harm, and surrounding circumstances. Actions may include an operational correction, written warning, event removal, participation restriction, suspension, or revocation of Membership.

    GILD may remove a person or restrict access without a prior warning where conduct is serious, intentional, dangerous, materially harmful to participant trust or safety, repeatedly violates prior instructions, or is not reasonably curable.

    If you are unsure whether a recording, publication, outreach activity, or information use complies with this Code, ask GILD before proceeding. Raise concerns about participant behavior privately with the GILD team unless immediate action is necessary for safety.