Hacker News Reader

Comment by shubber | Hacker News Reader

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."

View on HN

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."

Reply on news.ycombinator.com