
Open source is not a war zone - oneandoneis2
http://sushee.no-ip.org/opensourceisnotawarzone.txt
======
rdl
Between the really obviously bad stuff (people being physically assaulted in
general, whether at an event or not, and having a decent way to handle
reporting for that kind of thing), and stupid things (people telling jokes
privately in an audience and being overheard), there are some situations where
I actually appreciate learning how some behavior might be unintentionally
offensive and could be easily corrected.

Essentially in the same category as wanting to learn about some people being
colorblind and how using certain color combinations alone for UI distinctions
is thus a bad idea, or that scheduling a developer event for which you'd like
to attract students around traditional finals time is probably a bad idea.

Whether or not some behavior is "wrong", it's still good to know if certain
things have consequences you don't want. I think every developer community
wants to be as inclusive to competent/interested people as possible, so when
there are no or low cost ways to make an event more appealing, that's great.

~~~
gbog
> unintentionally offensive

The problem is that there is a current emphasis againt those faux-pas when the
offended part are women, while it is not the only case, and maybe not even the
most critical for the better of human beings.

I'd say the cultural faux-pas that are really dangerous and should be avoided
are those between remote cultures. If I offend a girl of my own culture or
country by some behavior, at least she will not misunderstand it too wildly.
But if I go to a remote place, I may unintentionally behave in a way that
might hinder for a long time the way foreigners are perceived in this place.
Then the consequences can be nefarious.

Let's give an example: I am French, criticizing is a kind of national sport.
If I come to some Chinese guy's house, and see a contemporay painting hung in
the living room, I might say "Oh! So you like this kind of painting? I really
don't understand it. Is it expensive? What! That much for a bunch of strokes?"

But in places like China, where negativity is not expressed up front for no
reason, this supposedly frank and personal impression can only be understood
as the most brutal way to spit in your host's face, and it is speedily deduced
that all foreigners are a bunch of brutes.

In short, if you are a dick at home, only you are a dick, and it is rarely
unintentional; while if you are unintentionally a dick oversee, all your
countrymen becomes brutes.

~~~
king_jester
> Let's give an example: I am French, criticizing is a kind of national sport.
> If I come to some Chinese guy's house, and see a contemporay painting hung
> in the living room, I might say "Oh! So you like this kind of painting? I
> really don't understand it. Is it expensive? What! That much for a bunch of
> strokes?"

Going into someone's home and insulting their taste is generally frowned upon
in most places.

~~~
neohaven
Actually, not in France!

You can go into someone's home and disagree with their taste in anything. It
provides interesting, open discussions.

"Criticising is a kind of national sport" is dead on. The French do whine a
lot. </irony>

(As context, I'm a french Canadian with lots of French people as friends.)

~~~
yason
What offends the French, then, by the way?

~~~
oneandoneis2
The continued existence of us British :D

------
mjg59
Experiences vary. Responses to certain things depend on what's happened to you
in the past. Some people's sexual harassment is someone else's harmless
flirting, an entirely innocent joke may be an unintended racial slur. The same
incident viewed by different people may be interpreted entirely differently.

So yeah, it's great that there are women who feel safe in open source
communities. It's wonderful that they've felt welcomed and unharassed. It
would be entirely inappropriate to say that their experience is false or to
suggest that they should object to behaviour that they feel is perfectly
acceptable. But it's also entirely inappropriate to suggest that the
experience of women who _don't_ feel safe is somehow false or unwarranted.
Changing the culture of our communities isn't a zero sum game. Making them
more accessible shouldn't come at the cost of alienating women who are happy
with how things are, but nor should those who are happy with how things are
resist efforts to improve the happiness of others.

~~~
mnicole
Yeah, I had a bit of a struggle with:

> Yes, we encountered dicks in our lives. Yes, we have been assaulted in our
> lives, maybe in broad daylight, in public. Yes, we've been hit on
> tastelessly and repeatedly and we have been disgusted and annoyed and
> sometimes we have been near panic. Some of us have encountered violence.
> We've gotten grabbed our asses, gotten felt up our boobs, have been stared
> at, wolf whistles at us and had some drunken moron hang in front of us. Yes,
> some of us have hit the proverbial glass ceiling in our careers.

> This is (a bad) part of our lives and yes, we judge social gathering and
> human encounters by how comfortable we are and how safe we feel and by their
> level of open or veiled dickishness.

> But this is only ONE aspect of being a woman and we do not like to let this
> aspect dominate how we live and behave within the tech communities of our
> choice.

The first paragraph acknowledges sexual and physical assaults/harassment, the
second acknowledges that these shape our worldview, but the third implies that
the victim is able to overcome the problem and let it slide off of their back.
I think this is a bit if a dangerous message to send because it negates the
unfortunate reality that it is _always_ in the back of your mind and it
insinuates that these encounters are one-offs, as opposed to childhood trauma
or ongoing domestic issues (ignoring that a lot of the harassment faced these
days is online and done by people who wouldn't at all think to do it in real-
life).

Also I'm not sure if "assault" is coming from someone's CoC, but:

> We also like to keep the vocabulary appropriate: An "assault" is an act of
> violence, an agressive act to overpower a person. We do not feel being hit
> on tastelessly being an assault. A blunt stare into our cleavage is not an
> assault. Someone accidently touching us is not an assault. The typical
> french pseudo-kiss-hug is a cultural thing and not an assault. A hug might
> be a completely friendly act and not an assault - even if it might not be
> welcome.

.. comes off more as "Hey guys, don't worry! We're not tight-asses about this
stuff!" vs. "Assault is the wrong word to use, but these are still forms of
harassment depending on the person and the action, so please know when and
what is appropriate for whom."

~~~
aeturnum
>third implies that the victim is able to overcome the problem and let it
slide off of their back.

I don't think she's saying that. These events are serious, but they're just
one event among a lifetime of events. If you needed to use a wheelchair to
move around, you would want people to respect your mobility limits, but you
would emphatically want to be more than just your wheelchair. This does not
imply an expectation to let that you should let the injury "slide off your
back," but it does mean that it's your life and we should all let you decide
how to deal with it. Don't push your understanding of how I should feel on me.

The author is saying, yes, these things happen and they're bad. But let's not
lose sight of what we are here for. We are all more than our injuries, and
even (especially!) when those injuries continue to haunt us we should strive
to do more than focus on them.

------
Deejahll
The authors mischaracterize the "code of conduct" statement first as a
redundant legal system, then as a decree that "spreads guilt onto an entire
gender," then as an "overarching act of protection condemning basically every
social behavior between men and women."

A code of conduct is none of those things. It is an invitation: "this is how
we expect people attending our event to behave; where you find it not so, be
assured that your concerns will not be ignored. Here are ways to help the
event organizers address conflicts: A, B, C."

There is a legitimate need for this statement to be made.

~~~
rlpb
It's also really handy to be able to refer to a code of conduct directly to
curb inappropriate behaviour. Referring to one gives more power to a direct
and immediate request for someone to curb his inappropriate behaviour.

This worked has well for me (I'm male, if it matters) at the one conference
I've seen inappropriate (if unintended) behaviour. A shout of "that's
inappropriate; we have a code of conduct here; move on to the next slide or
get off the stage" worked very well for me.

Using this turns an implied "that's inappropriate [in my opinion]" into a
specific and much more powerful "that's inappropriate [according to our
rules]".

~~~
saraid216
Yup. This is exactly how rule of law works. A codified, criticized, and
iterated set of demands is more useful than simply having a lone opinion in a
mostly egalitarian setting precisely because your opinion isn't alone and you
can prove it without asking anyone else to spend social capital.

------
marquis
>encountering 2 dicks at a 500 people conference are AMAZING odds - nowhere
else in our every day lives the odds are THAT good.

This made me smile with delightful recognition - it's been, more often than
not, that I've been treated with the utmost respect by my male peers in the
tech world. The same is not true in other industries I participate in where
women are even less represented, or old-school boy networks still reign.

------
aidenn0
> And let's face it: No real dick will be put off by a code of conduct
> helplessly condemning all kinds of unwelcome behavior - that's why they're
> dicks - but a huge portion of men will keep to themselves ridden by guilt
> because they're the ones actually thinking sensibly and will ask themselves
> about their own dickishness.

The point of a code of conduct is not to stop dicks from being dicks. It is to
remove any plausible defense. You can more easily ban dicks when you reduce
ambiguities.

~~~
angersock
beep boop must have non ambiguous social protocols beeep

Usually zero-tolerance and codes of conduct are not enforced evenly, and serve
only to lend bureaucratic weight to arbitrary (for better or worse) decisions.

------
nnnnni
It's great to see that some people are remaining level-headed after the amount
of butthurt that was caused at the recent convention.

The lady who whined about two guys having a private conversation was a jerk.
She's the type who ruins things for everyone.

~~~
rjknight
And so great to see that you're continuing the spirit of reasonableness and
tolerance!

~~~
kanja
Because committing a gender and race based hate crime is the highlight of
reasonableness and tolerance. But no, no the people pointing out hate crimes
are bad - they're the real problems here.

~~~
mtrimpe
You completely lost me here, but nothing in the SendGrid scandal even comes
close to deserving the label hate crime.

A hate crime is when some of my gay friends get their face beaten in once
again because they were holding hands.

~~~
davidcelis
I didn't know that massive amounts of death and/or rape threats didn't count
as hate crime. Thanks for the enlightenment.

~~~
theorique
Are they personal attacks? Absolutely.

Are they a bad idea? No doubt.

Are they illegal in some jurisdictions? Possibly.

But they definitely aren't a hate crime - they are simply an internet mob
action on their victim du jour. None of the attacks on Adria Richards were
done _because_ she was a woman. They were done because of the choice she made
in needlessly tweeting and publicly shaming the jokers sitting near her, and
triggering a social media firestorm. A man in the same situation would have
been attacked just as vehemently - indeed, many men have been the victims of
internet mob action.

~~~
blocking_io
_None of the attacks on Adria Richards were done because she was a woman_

Your naivety it adorable.

~~~
theorique
No need to be insulting about it, with misspelled words.

Do you have an actual argument, or just mud slinging?

------
CurtMonash
Excellent. Puts the focus right where it belongs -- on principles, not on
specific rules of behavior.

The closest thing we really need to codes of conduct is consciousness-raising
reminders of the sorts of things that can go wrong EVEN WITHOUT OVERT
physically-aggressive behavior. The big three of those seem to be:

1\. Tiresome references to objectification of women. E.g., booth babes,
scantily clad women in marketing materials, etc.

2\. Tiresome repetition of individually unobjectionable signs of attraction.
What's fun at gender-balanced party and tolerable OCCASIONALLY in the
workplace can be oppressive if it happens too often in a professional context.
So if you're attracted to a professional colleague, you should do your best to
refrain from showing it.

3\. Bad conversational patterns. E.g., a woman who's interrupted in
conversation may not power her way back the way many men would, so you should
be more careful if you have an urge to interrupt.

If you want, you can add in some kind of affirmative action concept to that as
well.

~~~
solistice
I have to disagree with "you should do your best to refrain from showing it".
I believe that the attempted refraining is causing those tiresome sexual
advances. I mean I know guys on both ends of the spectrum of flirting
proficiency, and it's the guys at the "refrain" end of the spectrum that make
situations akward when they try. Courtship is just as much a skill as
programming is. And refraining from programming because you aren't good at it
is never going to get you anywhere near good. When you then try to skript
something together desperately, you will fail. On the other hand, the
"experienced" rarely made conversations akward for them or the girl, in fact
most girls they talked with enjoyed it.

Things like attraction, they're low level things, and they'll leak out. And
the more you strain to hold them in, the more akward it gets. I have yet to
see a person that can convincingly mask off attraction towards another person.

So don't simply try to force attraction out of the workplace, rather keep
anything you do there as professional as you would with other things.

Also for 3. : Go get it girl!

~~~
CurtMonash
As in most non-trivial choices, context matters. I just emailed a woman that I
know professionally that she is beautiful. More precisely, I replied to a
photo of her lying in a hospital bed with her newborn daughter "Mother and
daughter are both beautiful". I had little fear she would think I was hitting
on her. :)

But it took a situation that extreme for me to say that. Her job requires her
to be nice to me, so I surely don't want her to regret that necessity.

Back in the 1980s, when ever the most impressive of women -- e.g. Ann Winblad,
Sandy Kurtzig or Esther Dyson -- felt they needed a flirtatious demeanor as
part of their toolkit, I usually didn't respond ... unless, of course, we were
dancing at a party. ;) But I recently saw Sandy again, made it clear she's
looking awesome, and hugged her a couple of times; she's over 60 now, and at
this point of her life I figured she probably wouldn't mind the attention. ;)

------
RyanZAG
_We are women of Perl and we're actually quite happy with our community._

I was unaware that there even were Perl conferences anymore - can anybody
involved here give some overview of the different Perl conferences and any
history of gender issues?

~~~
hkmurakami
* We are women of Perl and we're actually quite happy with our community.*

I've heard that the Perl community is the most accepting of all the OSS
communities out there, so this doesn't surprise me, and also delights me to
hear :)

~~~
_pmf_
It might be that they just have the most mature developers.

------
belorn
Nice to see someone else pointing out the statistics probability for women in
tech conferences.

Just doing some basic calculations, the risk in going to a tech conference
with 95% male vs 5% female has about 20 times higher risk than participating
in a 50/50 conference if one assume that sexual assaults are male->female.

Like the term going postal, I would really like to see a study that could
prove or disprove if technology conferences are in a higher risk group of
sexual assault or if that reputation is just perceived risk vs actually risk.

~~~
Shish2k
> prove or disprove if technology conferences are in a higher risk group of
> sexual assault

Sexual awkwardness and unintentional offence at a tech conference I can
entirely believe; but is there really an (even perceived, if not proven)
higher rate of /assault/ among nerds than average people? :S

~~~
arethuza
"higher rate of /assault/ among nerds than average people"

Pretty much the only "nerd rage" incident I can think of was a recent fight
between Star Wars and Dr Who fans:

<http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-norfolk-22542222>

~~~
bitwize
I knew England had soccer hooligans, but I wasn't expecting Doctor Who-ligans!

------
petermelias
The attitude of that letter is refreshingly positive and sensible. A nice
change from the usual super-charged sexist attitudes one way or the other that
usually only spark more polarized debate that loses sight of the bigger
picture.

The thing that frustrated me the most about the PyCon thing was how the
keynote was just completely eclipsed by the incident. Barely anyone reporting
even had the consideration to mention what the keynote was about-- only that
it was interrupted by a tweetsplosion.

------
theorique
This actually sounds rational and not hysterical - well done!

Though I'm not a Perl user, I think these women would be a delight to hang out
with, drink beer, and talk about open source.

~~~
AlexandrB
> This actually sounds rational and not hysterical - well done!

Nice choice of words: <http://etymonline.com/?term=hysterical>

------
desireco42
This needed to be said and I think they said it beautifully. Nothing else.

------
lizzard
I would love to sit down with the group of women who wrote this and get to
know them. While I disagree with them that having a code of conduct is
"helpless", and on many other points they make, there are plenty of ideas we
share as well. I'm happy to see them taking a step towards feminist activism
-- as they are in coming up with a collective statement with other women.

------
jabbernotty
I would like to read this, but the site is being blocked by websense. Could
someone put it on pastebin, or something like that?

~~~
waterhouse
<http://pastebin.com/XuLpXxvN>

~~~
jabbernotty
Thank you, both.

------
smoyer
Thank you! I'm a guy and it makes me uncomfortable even watching some guy make
a tasteless pass at a random woman. And regardless of what people believe,
friendship is possible (and a far better prelude to other things if both
parties desire).

As an aside, I'd hate to be named Richard after reading that posting.

------
mindcrime
I like the overall spirit of this article, but find this a bit puzzling:

 _We also like to keep the vocabulary appropriate_

So we start off by using a slang term for a piece of male anatomy as a
pejorative?

~~~
klez
In this context it seems appropriate. During a conference or in a professional
settings or in a church it wouldn't.

Appropriate is a relative term.

------
c0n5pir4cy
That was a good read, I would say that some tech conferences are that worried
about the bad press they are becoming a little misandristic.

~~~
juridatenshi
Yes, it's become so hard to be a man at tech conferences. They're so filled
with hate for men that one could describe it as misandry. Did the feminazis
also steal your ice cream?

~~~
metaphorm
its not hard to be a man at a tech conference. it is, however, hard to a
PERSON at a tech conference. its important to acknowledge the socially
destructive chilling effect that all the recent controversies/scandals have
caused.

------
tudorconstantin
I've been at several YAPC::EUs and I am quite surprised to hear that there are
dickheads there. People with strong, vocal opinions? Definitely, but I
personally love them the most - they bring colour to the events

------
k__
> Open Source Is Not A Warzone

Like anyone has the right to make this claim ;))

------
static_typed
Sadly, whereas tech conferences should be about the tech and the cool,
interesting and rewarding things we can do with it, it instead becomes dragged
down into a drama, where one woman can do more damage to other women then all
the men present (thinking about the pycon incident). As my colleague a female
developer, often says "These gynosaurs ruin it for the rest of us".

------
objhra
Oh c'mon, like men haven't been insulted or attacked. Like men haven't met
women who are complete dicks. Just because you're the weaker gender does not
give you the right to assume that we are all shit and you are some cherry on
top of a cake. No.

This women-in-tech-is-hard stuff is so overplayed to the point of it being
just plain stupid. What if every man who get's insulted by a woman who's a
complete dick starts writing about the stuff you, women, do? But we don't.
Why? Because we aren't that much of dicks as you, women, are.

And go on, think that what I say is pure hatrid or sexism or whatever. It's
not. You're statements may validate, but you're no innocent in this "war".

~~~
Yver
Your comment gives me the impression that you have misread the article (or not
read at all) or that you were replying to another comment.

IOW, it seems you're reacting to something that's not there.

