O'Reilly to adopt anti-harrassment Code of Conduct for Oscon | Hacker News Reader

O'Reilly to adopt anti-harrassment Code of Conduct for Oscon

radar.oreilly.com

51 pointsjdp2340 comments

I'm all about anti-harassment guidelines, but the following is just as offensive as harassment:

I’d like to borrow a line from the Flickr Community Guidelines, which use the term Creepiness as follows: "You know that guy. Don’t be that guy." If we hear that you are that guy, we will investigate, and you may be asked to leave.

That's not a clear guideline, and it's sexist, to boot. Consider:

We all know that prudish woman. Don't be that prudish woman.

That wouldn't fly, and for the same very good reasons that their guidelines need more work. They need first to remove the gender language, since unwanted advances and inappropriate behavior can come from either side, and second to spell out clearly what is prohibited, since that is the only way the rules can be fairly applied.

mkn, it is rarely a good idea to question the thought police. Prepare to be informed about how your male privilege invalidates any point you make.

It is a sad state of affairs that Tech conferences are now having to institute acceptable behavior guidelines.

Looking at some of the Past events, I suspect that at least some of this behavior is because some of the presenters want to be seen as "edgy". They will throw up a provocative image or make a sexist or borderline racist/Offensive comment to depict how much of a rebel they are.

Does this really add to the Technical weight or clarity of their talk? Personally speaking, I would never work with anybody who did this - no matter if they were a 10X productive super rockstar who invents new languages on the side.

"Personally speaking, I would never work with anybody who did this - no matter if they were a 10X productive super rockstar who invents new languages on the side."

Thank you for volunteering to help those of us who prefer to hire on merit. More for us.

I wish you much fun with hiring such a guy and exploding your team.

Appropriate behavior doesn't factor into your definition of merit? Do you hire purely on code quality?

So as long as someone is a 'rockstar' coder, it doesn't matter if he/she destroys the morale for the rest of your employees?

<sarcasm> I guess it's just their loss. They should feel privileged to be working with <rockstar coder>! </sarcasm>

Any organization that maintains an institutional fear of saying the "wrong thing" destroys its ability to effectively communicate such that the morale will have already hit rock bottom by the time someone actually does get offended.

So the only way to combat being afraid of offending people is to purposely be offensive?

If a slide with bikini-clad women with laptops can destroy your teem's morale you have a bigger problems to worry about.

My take-away is that the 'rockstar coder' feels the need to be offensive to impress others with his/her edgy-ness. The idea that people who do these things at conferences, would never do them anywhere else, is a little naive. The 'slide with a bikini-clad woman' is more likely a symptom, than a self-contained aberration.

Note that Tim most likely refered to actual physical aggression, something which is arguably worse than making "edgy" presentations (the article there mentioned OSCON: http://lwn.net/Articles/417952/).

I'm curious - why does a conference need a policy about such things at all? Are local laws against violent acts insufficient?

Are local laws against violent acts insufficient?

Yes, because perfectly legal behaviors can still be very alienating, and the homogeny that results from alienating behavior shows a lack of foresight on the part of conference organizers and the open source scene in general.

It is intellectually dishonest to conflate criminal acts (what ccdavid and I were discussing) with speech you disapprove of.

You asked a simple question, why is a harassment policy necessary when laws should be sufficient, and I gave a simple answer, because perfectly legal behavior can still be alienating and damaging to the success of social structures.

One reason may be that for big conferences, the audience is international, and may no know what is considered ok, inappropriate, and plainly illegal.

It also sends a signal: several female open source contributors have written about the fact that their complaints has been completely disregarded by the conference organizers. Stepping up publicly against those behaviors would make it harder to do so later, if only from a PR POV.

If not for any other reason, the organizers need to cover their asses so that they can kick the offender out without worrying about a potential lawsuit.

Local laws probably do not make it clear that you can kick an offender from a conference.

Mmm, what? From the linked article itself:

"One issue that has come up at some technical conferences is sexual or racist comments or images in slides. This is not appropriate. Speakers and exhibitors should use good judgment; if we hear complaints and we think they are warranted, you may not be invited back."

I'm all for freedom of self expression. Yes it means there could be a bad joke (damn you!) here and there, or a comment that is edgier than it should be, but hey we're all human... I do not believe creativity can thrive if you need to sanitize every word, and make everything perfectly dry and businesslike, with the organizers ready to chime in if you make any remotely sexual or racist comment...

Please do not present a false choice - It is not "be sexist, racist, offensive" OR "be dry, businesslike with every word sanitized".

Frankly presenters who indulge in this kind of behavior are giving in to the worst kind of intellectual laziness. If the only way they can get people to pay attention to their "incredibly dry sanitized" presentation is by making sexist/racist/<offensive> slides then that talk has no place in the conference to begin with.

This is exactly the kind of naive attitude that keeps women away - as another poster has linked would you consider any of this acceptable? http://lwn.net/Articles/417952/

No matter how you try to dress it up, it's simply a matter of (dis)taste. You may not like certain comments, and other people may not like some of your comments.

And "that keeps the women away" ahum, so women are now suddenly a group that need to be protected against bad speech? How is that not sexist? Women are not an uniform group with all the same preferences.

And yes, gross misbehavior is bad. But more happened there than just some bad words at a talk. Some people in public misbehaved and harassed (specific!) women. There should be guidelines against that, not against bad jokes in talks.

Much as I'm glad to see something along these lines, I'm a little taken aback that it took this long to publish. Even the original post refers to "last Oscon," and O'Reilly runs a lot of conferences. Last Oscon wasn't the first time "something happened."

This OSCON is the first (that I know of) where speakers started withdrawing their talks over the lack of a policy.

That somehow seems worse. It took community pressure from the speakers to get O'Reilly to have some sort of a policy against harassment/stalking/offensive behavior?

You can sort of see why. Some of the commenters in this post equate having a modicum of decency to, "they're takin' our freedoms!". I'm sure the OSCON staff tried to ignore the situation and not assume it was a big deal until it became a big deal.

I get your point, and I understand why this happened, but before recent events, O'Reilly's viewpoint was probably: Why would O'Reilly think it needs to have policies outlawing unprofessional and possibly illegal behavior in a professional conference?

Yes -- one could argue this opens the door for other bad behavior at OSCon, since it's not on the (new) list of things not to do.

That's the problem with putting these things in writing -- the more rules you write down, the stronger the impression that whatever's not on the list isn't against the rules.

  > one could argue this opens the door for other bad
  > behavior at OSCon

It's already been happening though. It's not like leaving it out of writing preventing incidents from happening.

It was done largely in solidarity with Noirin Plunkett, Director and Executive VP at the Apache Software Foundation, who had to deal with harassment at OSCON and physical assault at ApacheCon: http://blog.nerdchic.net/archives/705/

Has this alleged assault been proven? I don't recall reading about any charges being filed. Based on her original blogging about the alleged incident, I suspect we are not getting the full story.

This implied accusation of the victim to be, somehow, the cause of the misconduct (as in "you can't expect to be dressed like this and not attract unwanted attention") is one of the reasons such attacks are sometimes not reported.

Imagine if someone breaks into your home and steals your TV and, when you file the report at the police station, the cops implies that, by having a simple lock, you actually invited people in to steal your TV.

There's a big difference between dressing suggestively and going around at a drunk party touching a bunch of men intimately, and then moving off with a group to a restaurant and continuing to drink and touch people.

And that's what I said about implying the victim, somehow, caused the abuse, that the victim actually wanted to be abused.

When you go around actually touching people intimately, you are not a victim nor abused if some of them interpret that as you wanting to be touched back and act on that. It only becomes abuse if they don't back off if you tell them to stop at that point.

"He grabbed me, pulled me in to him, and kissed me. I tried to push him off, and told him I wasn’t interested (I may have been less eloquent, but I don’t think I was less clear). He responded by jamming his hand into my underwear and fumbling."

I hope their rules will apply to both men and women. There is sometimes a tendency to overlook when women harass men.

I can easily see innocent and benevolent dark humor being overreacted to with all this buzz about 'awareness' at conferences. Ironically sexist though it is, simply saying "don't be that guy" should be the extent of the conversation.

This says to me, "There are people ready to be offended at your talk. Walk on eggshells."

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