

Boston Ruby Community grows by 47 women in one weekend - telecaster
http://www.railsbridgeboston.org/blog/2012_nov_recap

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CitizenKane
For those who are curious, since there isn't any information in the blog
posting, this event is one which is targeted directly at women. I think it's a
great event, and it's even better that they can make arrangements for mothers
to participate as well. The Software Engineering community could definitely
use some diversity, and doing things to strengthen that is a wonderful thing.

~~~
lubutu
More specifically — assuming the rules were the same as for the first such
workshop, linked in the article — "women were automatically allowed to apply
for a spot, while men were allowed to apply if they knew a woman who was going
to attend."

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astar
FTA: "We also had one unfortunate incident where a student started saying
disparaging things about transgendered people at the same table where one
happened to be sitting. "

Good for them for calling this out...but it's a weird statement where its
vagueness just makes things weirder...either an awkward attempt to downplay a
really horrific show-stopping comment, or blowing out of proportion someone's
attempt at a joke.

edit// I think my problem is with the word "unfortunate" incident and "where
one happened to be sitting"...as if it were unfortunate that such comments
were made inadvertently where a transgendered person could hear them. Either
way, "unfortunate" doesn't seem like the right adjective here when
"unacceptable" seems more like it. (i.e. it's strange to describe
"disparaging" remarks towards African-Americans/women/any-other-group as
"unfortunate")

~~~
kookster
Thanks for your remark. I agree with you about the seriousness of this, and I
am sorry if our language was imprecise.

Please do not mistake any oddity in how this was written with the clarity of
how we reacted at the time, our commitment to inclusiveness, and our complete
agreement that this was unacceptable.

It wasn't even an attempted joke. The person made explicitly transphobic
remarks based on their own intolerant beliefs.

What the person said was offensive and unacceptable, and I personally used
those words, and I believe I made that clear to all involved at the time.
Rather than mionimize this, sweep this under the rug, or ignore it, I
escalated this to all the other organizers immediately after I heard about it,
and I am glad we wrote about it in the wrap-up.

I also apologized to the students that this happened at our event, and asked
what they would like to see happen, and what we could do. As the transphobic
person had already left, ejection was unnecessary (though would have been the
next step), and they immediate suggested putting a better policy in place for
our events - which we are doing. We also 'blacklisted' the person from all
future railsbridge events.

We agree that transphobic/racist/sexist/homophobic remarks are simply
unacceptable, and it was not about who happened to be sitting there. I would
say this about the students who happened to be sitting there - they stood up
for themselves and each other, and are the reason the maker of the transphobic
remarks left even before the organizers found out about it.

\- Andrew Kuklewicz

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MrBrandon
I thought being an assistant was a good experience. I'd do it again. This was
a great deal for participants too. A similar class at a professional training
center or college could easily cost between $1000 and $2000. In my opinion
people got enough information to continue learning on their own, or evaluate
if they want to they want to continue with paid training elsewhere.

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NateDad
I'm sorry this is only for women and their guests. The Boston software scene
needs more gatherings like this in general. I see meetups and talks in other
cities all the time, and very few in Boston.

~~~
kookster
Boston Ruby (bostonrb.org) has a monthly project night open to all levels to
learn and hack together, and a monthly meeting with great talks - and that is
just for Ruby. Pythonistas are active, and have their own things happening,
the Java User Group also has similar events - and those are off the top of my
head.

On the weekend we did this workshop, there was a Start-up Weekend event up the
street at the Microsoft NERD center, and directly above us at MIT Stata center
was Music Hack Day. My problem is choosing what events to go to, not finding
one.

