Truth to Power (T2P) is deeply dedicated to providing credible information. It's our explicit promise to members and readers. Credibility is also a mission-critical goal, since our integrity as a bias-free source of information and insight is part of what distinguishes T2P from many other publications, professional resources, and online communities.

To protect T2P's credibility, we actively monitor for and guard against spin, hype, and bias in all of our published content. While we acknowledge that the line between perspective and bias can be hard to draw, in general we attempt to follow established journalistic codes of ethics and apply a healthy dose of common sense in peventing spin and bias.

General controls

We do...

• Strongly urge all Core Guides and other community contributors to be objective and honest in the content they submit for publication
• Actively monitor community contributions for promotional, untruthful, and offensive content and tone
• Encourage the community to police itself by means of convenient, readily visible feedback and interaction mechanisms
• Clearly mark advertising, sponsorships, and other vendor-generated content
• Eschew partnerships, affiliations, gifts, favors, fees,and special treatment that compromise our integrity
• Reserve the right to censor, remove, redact, and otherwise edit contributions that violate our terms of service or our published principles

We don't...

• Publish content that we know to be biased or untruthful
• Republish third-party content that we perceive to be biased or untruthful
• Manage research or projects that are likely to produce inaccurate, promotional, or pointlessly sensationalistic results

Special notes on vendor and sponsor relationships

Vendors and their representatives offer perspective, customer insight, and expertise that can be uniquely valuable to the community. We also recognize that vendors may be motivated by commercial goals to post biased and promotional content and to attempt to develop inappropriate relationships with community members, including Core Guides.

Within this context, we nevertheless believe it's possible to foster positive, trust-based relationships between the community and vendors. Thus, we do allow non-promotional vendor interactions with the community. We also pursue vendor sponsorships and underwriting relationships that give vendors visibility, while supporting research and projects in the overall community interest.

To foster good vendor and sponsor interactions, and discourage bad ones, we enforce some limitations on vendor interactions:

• We encourage vendors to engage only in constructive conversations with the community through normal interaction channels
• We allow the community to opt out of promotional mailings and we respect members' requests not to share their information
• We do not endorse, partner with, or affiliate ourselves with hardware and sofware vendors
• We don't engage the employees or representatives of solution vendors and VARs as Core Guides
• When sponsors or vendor representatives interact with the community through common channels, such as comments and forums, we encourage them to make their affiliations apparent. In the absence of voluntary self-identification by vendors, community moderators may perform this function on the vendor's behalf.
• We don't publish vendor-generated content as our own
• If we engage vendors to sponsor or underwrite research or other initiatives, we do not allow those parties to control or dictate the content. We do not require sponsor approval to publish any content. We will not remove or change published content by sponsor demand (excepting, in some cases, a sponsor's own content).
• If a sponsor or vendor disagrees with content published on T2P, we consider their objections in a fair and balanced manner
• We reserve the right to limit and/or disable the accounts of vendor representatives who illicitly solicit community members, post promotional content via interactive Web functions, or otherwise engage in blatantly promotional or spammy activity.

In addition, T2P's profile and private messaging components allow any registered member to block messages from any other. Any community member may also easily report abuse of communication functions. We take such reports very seriously and may, at our sole discretion, immediately suspend or limit the accounts of offending members.

Moving targets

As the T2P community and initiatives grow, we expect to encounter situations that aren't explicitly covered by the aforementioned conditions. In these "unknown unknowns" cases, as in all others, our response will be in accordance with our general goals of cultivating a pitch-free, bias-free, open, and constructive online community.