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Community

Status: Pre-formation draft. The founding board and Ethics Committee will adopt or amend this charter. Until then, the Administrator runs community as outlined here.

The Guild's online community is a peer space for cannabis professionals — Certified Ganjiers, Community Education members, and Friends of the Guild. It exists to support professional learning, peer support, and the development of standards of practice, not to drive product sales or partisan organizing.

Charter

Item Value
Purpose Peer learning, standards-of-practice development, support for credentialed and pre-credentialed members
Owner Communications Committee (operations) + Ethics Committee (conduct, appeals)
Day-to-day operator Administrator + two-volunteer-moderator-per-major-group rotation
Platform BuddyBoss Platform inside the Guild's WordPress hub, themed by guildcommerce-theme. Same login as dues, LMS, and the forms library. See ADR-0005 and the GuildCommerce platform overview.
Identity Real names required for Certified Ganjier members. Verified pseudonyms permitted for Community Education and Friend tiers (Guild verifies identity internally; the public handle may be a pseudonym).
Conduct standard Counsel-drafted; lives under governance/policies/. The Ethics Committee owns conduct procedure once seated.
Mentor program mentor-program.md
Ambassador program ambassador-program.md

Membership and access

Tier Community access Identity
Friend of the Guild (free) Read-only access to public groups; comment in the welcome and introductions group; no DMs by default Verified pseudonym permitted
Community Education Member Full read/write in member groups; mentor pairing eligible; can post in jobs and resources channels Verified pseudonym permitted
Certified Ganjier Member Full read/write in all groups including practitioner-only spaces; eligible to host AMAs and topic threads; mentor or ambassador eligible Real name required

Access is enforced by the BuddyBoss role-and-group permissions configured in the guildcommerce-core-plugin. The role-permissions table is the canonical source of truth — see Form O — Ecosystem Role Permissions Matrix.

Group taxonomy

The community uses a small, deliberate group structure. New groups require Communications Committee approval; the goal is depth, not sprawl.

Public groups (open to all members; Friends can read)

  • Welcome & Introductions — single open thread; new-member intros, monthly orientation links
  • Announcements — one-way Guild updates from the Administrator
  • Resources & Reading — sharing studies, articles, and reference material; citations expected
  • Standards of Practice (open discussion) — public-facing discussion of the Guild's positions; the closed working groups feed standards here once published

Member groups (Community Education + Certified)

  • General Practice — peer questions across all practice areas
  • Sensory & Craft — cultivar evaluation, terpene-led discussion, sensory protocols
  • Cultivation — grower-side practice
  • Retail & Hospitality — front-of-house, customer education, menu design
  • Compliance & Operations — regulation tracking, SOPs, audit prep
  • Education & Training — for instructors, assessors, and curriculum contributors
  • Jobs & Opportunities — postings only in this group; CoC §3 applies

Practitioner-only groups (Certified Ganjier members)

  • Certified Practitioners Lounge — peer-only space; off-the-record norms apply (still subject to CoC and confidentiality rules)
  • Standards Working Groups — closed working groups producing the Guild's standards-of-practice documents; outputs published to the public Standards group

Working / committee groups (members of the relevant body only)

  • One per standing committee, used for asynchronous committee work between meetings
  • One per active task force, dissolved when the task force closes out

Monthly operating cadence

Cadence Activity Owner
Daily Triage queue review (≤24 hr response target) On-call community-ops volunteer pair
Weekly Welcome new members; pin one resource thread per major group Communications volunteer
Bi-weekly Mentor matching batch (see mentor-program.md) Mentor program coordinator
Monthly "First Friday" community AMA with a Certified Ganjier or guest practitioner Communications Committee
Monthly Anonymized triage volume + program-health report to Communications Committee Lead community-ops volunteer
Quarterly Ambassador deliverable review (see ambassador-program.md) Ambassador program coordinator
Quarterly Group health check — archive inactive groups, refresh sticky resources, sanity-check group taxonomy Communications Committee
Annually Member community survey (see member-survey-draft.md) Communications Committee + Administrator

Roles

Role Source Responsibility
Administrator Paid staff Platform owner; account access; billing; vendor relationship with BuddyBoss
Lead community-ops volunteer (per group) Volunteer First-line triage of routine items (spam, off-topic, malformed posts), welcome new joiners, weekly recap. Conduct concerns are handed to the Communications Committee liaison, who routes per the counsel-drafted policy.
Co-volunteer (per group) Volunteer Backup; daily queue review; on-call rotation partner
Mentor Program Coordinator Volunteer Matching, mentor onboarding, recognition (see mentor-program.md)
Ambassador Program Coordinator Volunteer Cohort recruitment, quarterly deliverable review, term-end recognition
Communications Committee liaison Committee member Group taxonomy, AMA programming, owner of any escalation that goes beyond routine triage — routes to Ethics Committee or counsel as the policy dictates

Volunteer roles use the standard volunteer onboarding and volunteer agreement. Community-ops hours count toward the volunteer-hour ledger and certification (see hours-certification.md).

What this document covers (and what it doesn't)

This README is ecosystem operations only — how the community runs day-to-day on the BuddyBoss platform, how programs feed members in, and how volunteer ops sit on top of the existing volunteer infrastructure.

The following are deliberately out of scope here and will be drafted by counsel and adopted by the founding board:

  • Conduct standards, prohibited behavior, and the wording of any code
  • Sanction tiers, suspensions, revocations, and appeals procedure
  • Identity verification rules, data handling for verification, and pseudonym policy
  • Reporting channels for conduct, retaliation, or governance concerns
  • Disclaimers (no legal advice, no medical advice, etc.)

When those are adopted, this README will link out to them; until then, day-to-day routine triage (spam, off-topic, malformed posts) is handled by community-ops volunteers, and anything beyond that is escalated to the Communications Committee liaison who routes it.

Cross-references