Welcome to Esri Community!
We're excited to have you join us. Before you get started on your journey, we invite you to check out the information below about our community mission, member guidelines, and tips on getting started.
What is Esri Community?
The Esri Community is where the Esri Community—customers, Esri staff, and others in the GIS and geospatial professional community—connect, collaborate, share ideas and grow their career.
What is the mission of Esri Community?
The mission of Esri Community is to provide a central online destination where members can gather to exchange ideas, solve problems, accelerate success and build relationships to create a better world through the use of geospatial technology. To help guide and make sure you have a positive, productive, and fulfilling experience in the community, below are our Esri Community Guiding Principles.
Esri Community Guiding Principles
The Community Guiding Principles are "Be Helpful. Be Human. Be Smart." They closely align with our Esri Community Terms of Use, and you can use these Guiding Principles as a quick check to make sure your contributions are adding value and supporting our community goals.
Be Helpful.
Being helpful means, you should always try and elevate the conversation with a thoughtful contribution while thinking of others. Examples of Being Helpful include:
- Respect others by keeping your posts positive and your comments constructive. Personal arguments, personality conflicts, insults, name-calling, inflamed speech, obscenity, and other deviations from our professional mission are not appropriate. As a general rule of thumb: if you wouldn't do it or say it in a large public meeting, you shouldn't do it or say it in the Community.
- Respect people's time and attention by asking well-thought-out questions and sharing what you've learned.
- Avoid sensitive or provocative topics. Do not start discussions about anything that could be regarded as off-topic, and provocative, or inflammatory. For example, topics such as politics and religion are best avoided in the Community.
- Answer questions: If you have the answer to a question, we encourage you to respond to posts when someone asks a question. If you don't know the answer, help find someone who does.
- Make sure your contributions are relevant to the conversations and groups. Please do not create duplicate posts in different areas of the community to avoid fragmenting discussions. If you have a new question, start a new post rather than interrupting a conversation. Always ask yourself, "Is my comment or content going to enhance the conversation? Am I posting it in the right place?"
- We know you have a lot of ideas for improving the Esri products and services. If you are a customer or partner, you are encouraged to submit new ideas on any of the idea boards related to your suggestion or support existing ones. Don't forget to review our idea submission guidelines before posting, which is on the ArcGIS Ideas page.
- If you've found a valuable post, click "Kudos" or share it with others.
- Welcome new members and guide them to meaningful conversations and content.
Be Human.
Being human means professionally being yourself. An important part of collaboration includes building relationships and getting to know each other. We encourage you to be social and share parts of who you are that are appropriate and meaningful because doing so helps make the community more connected and human. Examples of "Being Human" include:
- Sharing relevant personal or professional experiences and interests, news about a goal you accomplished, acknowledging others for a job well done, etc.
- Sharing work experiences and moments that express your creativity, thoughtfulness, and humanity.
- Making new connections. Join a conversation with others that you may not know to build new relationships.
Be Smart.
Being smart means to think before you post. If something makes you the slightest bit uncomfortable, figure out what needs to be changed, edit your content, then post. Examples of "Being Smart" include:
- Avoid posting confidential information or anything that fellow employees or customers, clients, business partners, suppliers, vendors, or other stakeholders might find offensive.
- Don't post anything that would violate any contractual agreements (copyright, trade secret, or otherwise) or nondisclosure agreements to which you are a party.
- Be careful with personally-identifying information. Do not send or post social security numbers, home telephone numbers, driver's license numbers, addresses, credit card numbers, etc.
- Don't use the Esri Community to promote your business or advertise affiliated websites, domains, companies, or services in any of your discussions, and don't spam community members.
- If you have questions or want to learn more about how to partner with us to create relevant and appropriate partner content, contact the Esri Community team at EsriCommunity@esri.com.
- If it's not in a private group or message, then content shared in the Community is open and public. By default, contributions shared openly in the community are accessible to the Esri Community and beyond.
- All content should be accurate and credible. You should ensure that you have factual information before posting it. Please refrain from sharing inaccurate news or misleading information.
- Digital = Forever. Just like your email and instant messages, content and communications in the Esri Community are immediately captured, are retained and will be accessible far into the future. Make sure you're comfortable with your contributions being accessible for a long time.
The Esri Logo and Esri Staff & Distributors
You will notice that some community members have an Esri indicator next to their names. This means they are either Esri Inc or an Esri Global Distributor employee.
Like you, they are members of the community, and we encourage them to share their knowledge, product updates, and opinions here.
Community Feedback
We want this to be the best community it can possibly be - so let us know what you think or how we can help improve your experience in Esri Community. You can submit your feedback in the Community Resources (formerly Community Basics) section, look for the Community Feedback board.
Moderation and content review
When needed, the Esri Community team and moderators will review comments before or as they are posted. Those that are off-topic, not relevant to GIS, or violate any policies will be redirected, removed, or not posted.
Regarding violations, we will follow a Steer, Edit, Lock, Archive, Ban policy.
- Steer - Post a suggestion or send it via private messaging
- Edit- remove the offending information from the post
- Lock - consider locking the thread so that no more replies can be added.
- Archive/Remove posts or threads may be moved to a private archive/temp removal board
- Ban - If problems persist with a specific user, the user may be banned from the site temporarily or permanently
All stages of this violation process are subject to the context of the violation. The Community team will communicate at each phase of the violation. We hope to enforce these rules on a limited basis and encourage you to follow the Community Guidelines to ensure a meaningful and respectful experience for all members of the Esri Community.
Flag inappropriate content for review
If you recognize any violation of these guidelines, please notify us within the community by choosing "Report Inappropriate Content" from the post's Options menu and let us know why you feel the content is inappropriate
Ready to Get Started?
For quick tips and information on how to use Esri Community, check out the quick help section, found under your Avatar drop-down menu in the top navigation bar. For more in-depth community help, visit the Community Resources (formerly Community Basics) area (can be found in the top navigation bar of any page and in the footer).
