Picture credit: https://xkcd.com/386/

Welcome to the Barista Hustle Online Universe!

We’re a community made up of the private Barista Hustle Facebook Group page (but anyone can join!), our public Barista Hustle Facebook page, Barista Hustle Community Forum, our Barista Hustle Instagram and Twitter accounts, and anyone who comments on our articles on the Barista Hustle website.

We aim to engage in meaningful, professional, friendly discussions surrounding coffee. A fundamental goal of Barista Hustle is to help the world make better coffee — and there is a lot that falls under that umbrella. So we want to talk about the deep and meaningful, the scientific and technical, the broader industry-wide topics, and the smaller individual level aspects. We want to talk about all the important stuff.

To enable these conversations to happen in a positive, respectful, and equitable manner, we have a few guidelines.

Let’s Start With: How Things Work

Barista Hustle Facebook Group Page:

The BH Facebook Group is where a majority of our engagement happens in the Barista Hustle Online Universe. It’s where we ask the tough questions that affect large spreads of the coffee industry. Community members of the Facebook Group are from all over the world, so we work hard to engage as many folks from as many different places as possible, whenever possible. Conversations here are challenging and encourage civil discourse —  the topics are less about the details of why your espresso tastes sour and more about ensuring the future of the industry by focusing on people and management/business, for example.

We take all kinds of submissions for our Facebook Group page. Before submitting though, we’d love it if you used the handy search feature, throw in some keywords, and see if maybe your question or a similar one has been asked before.

Once you’ve submitted a post we have a team of (awesome) moderators that look at it to make sure our conversations are relevant, interesting, and unique. If your post is close, we might get in touch to help touch it up before publishing. Sometimes we may reword a bunch of similar questions with our own take on it, and give you a hat-tip in the post. If there’s similar content posted earlier, sometimes we’ll tag you in the existing thread as well.

Post Submission Guidelines:

The following posts will be deleted:

• Recommendations
• Classifieds/Jobs postings
• Advertisements
• Uber-specific technical coffee questions (eg: “How should I be dialing in xyz?”) and equipment-related posts. The BH Community Forum is the place for this!
• Posts that are hyper-focused on issues in one particular country or region
• Anything that may be deemed uninteresting to discuss with the whole of the group
• Any post starting with “hey guys” (you know we’re not all guys here, right?)

If you submitted a post and after while find that it hasn’t been approved, check to see if it falls under any of the above. If you have any questions or concerns, feel free to reach out to an admin about it!

We’re a discussion page for issues relevant to our community, operating under the principles of a benevolent dictatorship — we attempt at all times to be fair and reasonable, but we also have a pretty good idea of the conversations we want to be having here.

We have a volunteer group of moderators with varying backgrounds and perspectives from within the coffee industry and outside of it. Mods vet all submissions based on the above criteria. Admins and mods are visible via a badge next to their names. We are always looking to expand our moderator group as the community continues to grow. We take notice of individuals who are active participants that follow the Discussion Guidelines and consistently add interesting, unique perspectives to our discussions. If we think you’d be a good mod, we’ll get in touch with you, and on the other end, hit us up if you’re interested!

The Barista Hustle Community Forum:

If you have a specific technical question, the Barista Hustle community forum is your best bet. This is the BH Fire Hose; anything short of spam or offensive material is probably gonna get through. Posts here are only lightly moderated for submission. Use the handy search feature too, just to double check there’s not a similar question to yours already answered.

If your Facebook group post isn’t accepted, it may be because we think it’d be better suited for the community forum. We’ll let you know with the pinned post at the top of the Facebook group, tagging you in the comments.

Anyone is free to view the topics here and read through them, but if you want to comment you’ll need to set up an account. This is free and pretty easy to do.

Barista Hustle Comments Section:

Under most of our articles on the Barista Hustle site, we have a comments section. Anyone can comment here but you’ll need to log in with either your Disqus, Facebook, Twitter, or Google account. We do our best to answer every question or query asked here, but if there’s radio silence for a while, throw the question into the FB Group or Forum page.

Our Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter Pages:

These are our primary communication channels. If you want to know what we’re up to, what’s been happening recently in the community, or just touch base with us — this is where you’ll hear about it. Again, we try to answer most comments, questions, or queries here, but sometimes our time can be a little constrained. If we don’t get back to you, we’re probably just really busy!  

We really need to point this out though, we are quite busy — we can’t do free consulting for everyone, that’s what the community is for ; )

Discussion Guidelines: What We Expect

We hope that gives you a clear idea of how things work with our online spaces here at Barista Hustle. We also want to make our expectations clear for how you participate in those spaces.

1) Good Vibes Only: Let’s Keep This Place a Nice Place.

This is our space we share with each other, so let’s keep it clean, well-lit, with good vibes for all. We’re a shared community resource — just like a public park — so let’s treat it the same.

2) ABC: Always Be Civil. (DBAD: Don’t Be a Doofus.)

• Nothing destroys a healthy, friendly, and productive conversation like rudeness.
• Respect all members of our community. Don’t harass anyone, belittle their contribution, talk down to them, or talk over them.
• Don’t impersonate anyone. That’s super not cool.
• Always be civil. Don’t post anything a reasonable person would consider offensive, abusive, or hate speech.
• Just so we’re clear: no hate speech. We will not be tolerant of intolerance. We are trigger happy with the block button.
• Keep it clean. Don’t post anything obscene or sexually explicit.

Civility means thinking of these conversations as happening in your local cafe, across the table from each other, sipping on a cozy ‘cino. We don’t need to ALL CAPS YELL at each other. We need to engage in productive conversations that push our industry forward, conversations we can learn from each other. So ABC peeps: Always Be Civil (and don’t be a doofus).

3) Improve the Discussion. Always.

We can all help make this a great place for discussion if we all work to improve the discussion in some way. It doesn’t matter how small; as long as we keep pushing forward. Think this over before pushing “post” — are you adding to the discussion? Moving it forward? What are you actually asking / stating? If you have any doubt then maybe sit on it for a while, make a coffee, think it over.

When you are posting, ask for clarification if you’re unsure —  don’t presume. Act in good faith and remember the first two points above. What we talk about here matters to us, and we want you to act as if it matters to you too.

4) You Will Read Something You Disagree With.

And that’s fine! But we want you to be ready for that moment too! This is a global and diverse community; we’ll have global and diverse ideas and viewpoints. Some of which you may not agree with.

So remember: criticize ideas, not people. Please avoid:

• Name calling.
• Ad hominem attacks.
• Responding to a post’s tone instead of its actual content.
• Knee-jerk contradiction.

Instead, we want reasoned counter-arguments: critically thought-out, that improve the conversation and move it forward. Steel-human arguments instead of straw-humaning — argue the stronger points of the conversation and carry them to their logical conclusion. Disagree with a reasoned response, don’t blindly argue. Dissent is fine. Lame rudeness and ill-thought out arguments aren’t.

5) Your Participation Counts. All of You.

By engaging with our entire community, we can all only benefit. So join in the conversation, no matter how small you think your contribution may be. The conversations we have here set the tone for everyone. Help us influence the future of this community, and the direction of our wider industry, by choosing to engage in discussions that make this forum an interesting place to be.  Your contribution counts, your participation is important. So crack your fingers and join in.

6) Don’t Respond to Bad Behaviour.

When you see bad behaviour, don’t reply. It encourages the bad behaviour by acknowledging it, sucks up your energy, and wastes everyone’s time. Just ignore it. In order to maintain our community, moderators reserve the right to remove any content and any user account for any reason at any time. We will remove bad behaviour from our community. It’s our call, but we attempt to maintain a fair and reasonable stance. But it’s way easier for y’all if you simply try and stay away from the meer speckle of bad behaviour. Anti-Nike, yo: just don’t do it.

7) Terms of Service and Privacy Policy.

Legal talk can get boring, but we gotta protect ourselves — and you and your data — against unfriendly folks. We have a Terms of Service describing your (and our) behaviour and rights related to content, privacy, and laws, indemnification, termination, and dear Lord it’s very boring. But to use this service, you must agree to abide by our TOS. You can find it following the link here. 

And that’s all, folks!

Thanks for making it all the way through this! And this is worth repeating again:

We aim to engage in meaningful, professional, friendly discussions surrounding coffee. A fundamental goal of Barista Hustle is to help the world make better coffee — and there is a lot that falls under that umbrella. So we wanna talk about the deep and meaningful, the scientific and technical, the broader industry-wide topics, and the smaller individual level aspects. We want to talk about all the important stuff.

So help us talk about the important stuff.

(Comments are closed on this, peeps — but you can reach out to us through the above channels if you have something to add!)