Operational Guidelines

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The following guidelines should be considered as “addendums” to the existing ICMS Bylaws:

1. Distribution Lists: All General and Registered Members' distribution lists (DLs) will be moderated by the Mail/Group Moderation team and are overseen by the Executive President and Executive Secretary. The General DL is a superset of the Registered DL. All newly introduced members shall be added to the General DL by the Memberships team. If you copy to the General DL, there is no need to also copy to the Registered DL to avoid duplicate emails.
2. Official Communication: All official communications shall be sent to the Registered DL and, depending on the context, can also be copied to the General DL.
3. Cautious Usage of Membership DLs: The use of Membership DLs should be approached cautiously by both leadership and membership. The Welcome Message to newly introduced General/Registered members shall be sent only by the Memberships Team and/or a few designated executives, such as the President or Secretary. To minimize email traffic, other ICMS members are not encouraged to reply to member-introducing emails sent to the entire distribution list but are welcome to communicate directly with new members.
4. Moderation Authority: The Moderation team is authorized to delete any email in the moderation queue based on their objective judgment.
5. Special Occasion Greetings: All special occasion greeting emails (such as New Year, Sankranthi, Ugadi, etc.) should be sent to the membership only by the President and/or Secretary on behalf of the entire ICMS leadership. Mass replies from general membership and/or other ICMS Executive members to such greeting emails shall be deleted from the Moderation Queue.
6. Irrelevant Content: Emails containing irrelevant content (abusive language, explicit caste tags, pornographic material, etc.) will always be deleted from the Moderation Queue immediately.
7. Bcc Policy: No member (including all ICMS Executives) is allowed to “Bcc (blind copy)” their emails to some or all ICMS members. If someone does this, the Board has the right to suspend that member’s membership without further discussion.
8. Negative Content: Emails (from either members or executive members) containing negative or damaging content about the organization will always be deleted from the Moderation Queue, and the senders of such emails are subject to disciplinary action by the Board. The Moderation team will exercise objective judgment on whether an email is damaging or detrimental to the organization and will take appropriate action (either to release the email to members, delete it from the moderation queue, or report an abusive case against the sender to the Board). The Moderation team shall formally file a complaint against individuals who send damaging emails to the membership with the Board Chair, and appropriate action shall be taken with majority approval from the Board.