Python Software Foundation will require code of conduct at all sponsored events
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The culture of pycon is entirely welcoming to my students. I won't be able to take students this year, because the travel costs from southeast Alaska are pretty steep. But I have shared with my students the specific ways that the python community supports different groups of non-traditional programmers: pycon policies, pyladies, the Boston Python Workshop initiatives, etc.
Knowing there are specific efforts to support non-traditional programmers makes my students much more open to considering a career in a technical field. The work that Jesse and others are doing is having a significant impact on a large number of people. It's an iceberg, as well; whatever visible impact you see, there are 10 times as many people benefiting from this work.
Actually, I'm not even sure that "enforcement" is all that relevant. It's more about articulating the norms of behavior so that people can learn from them and grow.
Bingo. Furthermore, any of the stuff in the CoC seems pretty reasonable - don't express prejudice, don't harass people. It's really "Social Graces 101" level stuff, not some bid to constrain free speech.
Unfortunately a small minority apparently don't know how to behave appropriately around others, and need this shit to be spelled out.
Obviously, 99% of people are not going to make prejudiced jokes or comments in their presentation or in groups at a conference.
A code of conduct simply sets out the expectations at this level, and creates a standardized procedure for what to expect when these expectations are violated.
It is unfortunately that something like this has to be implemented because it is common sense, but if PyCon or any other organization has to be policing their attendees like children until the learn, then so be it.
Shouldn't it be obvious to not act like a jerk at a Python event?
BUT EVERYONE IS NICE, WE'VE ALWAYS BEEN COOL I know. Honestly, I do. Except for minor incident that I recall, PyCon US has largely been free of issues such as this. Every meetup, conference, etc I have been to has been filled with nice, kind people and largely jerk-free. This is a testament to the community as a whole.
So, you ask: if we're all chill cool people, and nothing bad has happened, why have one?
Because it won't always be that way.
If we continue to expand and grow (and we will), and if we continue to grow even more diverse - in sex, race, creed and geography - the chances of "an incident" will grow. In fact, I know incidents have happened and been dealt with.
So no, the unspoken rule of "don't be a jerk" doesn't scale very well. And that's what we're talking about - a scalability problem. The social norms and rules of a group of five people, or one hundred people may float. What about 200? 500? 800? How about 2300 people (the attendance of PyCon 2012)? No. "Don't be a Jerk" may be our unspoken, unwritten community motto; but its not enough for those on the outside looking in.
Those outside of these circles want clear lines on behavioral expectations. They want to know that not only are there unwritten rules about not being a jerk - they want to know what will happen if a Jerk Occurs. This sets their expectations, and it gives them comfort. It makes them feel more welcome, more safe. Especially when they're part of a group who has been put under constant objectification and harassment for decades in our industry.
When I read the article I can't help substituting "label on cup" and reading incident as a coffee burn.]
Seeing "we now have an anti-harassment policy!" followed up by "and women are specifically encouraged to attend and apply." makes me cringe.
It doesn't feel like the way to encourage my wife (engineer) or any of the numerous women I have developed software with that the conference is an awesome event.
I am not "in a spot" or "rationalizing it" - I have concrete proof that changes like this in combination with a massive amount of outreach has had an extremely positive effect for the community and conference.
What could go wrong?
Part of this effort is the social realization of one of the Zen of Python rules:
Explicit is better than implicit.
What I mean is this: no more unwritten rules or expectations.It's just setting a basic standard of behavior - be nice, don't be a jerk, don't harass people based on their personal characteristics.
And on the flip side, it's saying to people who otherwise might be reluctant to participate, thinking they would face prejudice, "hey, we got your back, prejudice against you is not allowed here".
Seems pretty innocuous.
Which country is that?
The Law of Equality: https://www.retsinformation.dk/forms/r0710.aspx?id=20929 (could not get google translate to work)
I don't know enough about Denmark to know whether gender discrimination persists in technical fields, but my guess is that women make up far less than half of the technical workforce (that's the case for most of Europe [2]).
[1] http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/09/the-gender-wage... [2] http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=543812.543839
How exactly does that however play into sexual harassment on conferences?
The relevance? There's this horrible idea that sexism doesn't exist in enlightened liberal societies with aggressive equality laws, and so any attempts to fix harassment should be done by just passing laws. In reality it's a social issue, and just like any social issue it doesn't get fixed through laws alone. Social attitudes need to change, and part of that is making it clear what the acceptable social attitudes at community events are.
It's not the time that matters, it's the timing. You can't legally (and you should not) force a pregnant woman to come to work.
> There's this horrible idea that sexism doesn't exist in enlightened liberal societies
Not all gender inequality is sexism. There are physical and psychological differences between our genders. Case in point: possibility of dichromacy among males versus potential tetrachromacy among females.
>Not all gender inequality is sexism.
True, just the vast majority of it. But next time women complain that they're being underpaid, do remind them of the lucrative opportunities that await them in the growing field of "People better able to tell the difference between shades of green". I'm sure that'll make them feel better.
And even in Denmark there are days where the mother is not allowed to work for the benefit of the child. And that is a product of biology.
And whole ranges of employees make less than other ranges of employees. There are lots of women in business that make 20 and 100 times what I make, for example.
Equal pay for men and women does not necessarily translate to equality at the workplace (it's based on a non verified premise that men and women's output and negotiating skills are equal). Have you researched if those women that make 10% less than men:
1) put 10% less to their work (e.g because they prefer investing more in their children than in the whole career rat-race)
2) Are less cut-throat salary negotiators? As an employee myself, I know that employees get what they are able to negotiate, not what they deserve and surely not equal pay.
Equality is equal pay for equal work -- regardless of gender race or creed.
Even if the event wants to say something about it above and beyond that, it frees them up to say "We all know the law on this, but to encourage our ideal atmosphere (which is X) the voluntary by attendance code of conduct will also be ...." without repeating all the mundane bits of the law.
tl;dr, don't remind me something is illegal, remind me certain attitudes are unwelcome and leave it there.
http://boingboing.net/2012/05/14/moderator-at-dell-event-in-...
You took something valid (like being against sexual harassment when it's a bloody actual harassment) and you overblown it out of proportion.
Italians or French, e.g., have no problem with things such as office romance.
For example, the French did not give a flying duck if their President had a known ex-marital affair and even a child (like Miterrand), whereas Americans had this whole BS "moral outrage" when Clinton had an affair. Heck, Italians even voted multiple times into office a Prime Minister that is known to have wild parties with models and prostitutes (Berlusconi).
Not everybody in the world is as uptight as white Americans.
* You don't have a right to attend a private event. The organizers of any event - a conference, a concert, whatever - have the right to ask you to leave at any point for any reason. You are, in fact, more protected with a code of conduct in place because it articulates the process instead of leaving it up to the whims of the organizers.
* You don't have any right to due process or "legal protection"; the conference organizers aren't the police! They're not deciding what's "truth" or not; they're deciding whather to allow you to stay at an event they're responsible for.
* If you're talking about PyCon, it's hardly "a few local programmers". PyCon is a conference with a large staff, a budget of over a million dollars, and an established NPO (the PSF) behind it.
* If you can't trust the organizers of an event, then why the heck are you attending?
* People don't just randomly make up harassment. In reality, harassment is vastly underreported because of the way victims of harassment are routinely ignored, shamed, and blamed.
* Wanna know a really good way to not be accused of harassment? Don't harass anyone! If you find not being a harasser so hard, then yeah you probably shouldn't go to the event.
If someone, man or woman, would report sexual harassment in Denmark, it would be done to the police, who would take proper actions. Actually, I explicitly do not want the conference staff to act like a conference police. Keep in mind that if they throw someone out of a conference because of harassment which proves wrong later - this persons image will be forever destroyed in the community.
I'm not talking about PyCon, it was mentioned that this applies to anything sponsored by PSF (correct me, if I'm wrong).
I don't personally know who organizes every event I attend, I attend events because I think the subject is interesting or because people I find interesting attends or speaks.
I agree harassment is underreported but there have been issues with fake reports in the media as well.
The actions of conference staff are a route for dispute resolution for things that may not warrant law enforcement involvement, and if law enforcement should be involved, it will be and will obviously supersede any decisions by staff. More importantly however, is that law enforcement involvement is painful, potentially ruinous, and does not take into account the actual conference nor its other attendees.
Hypothetical: corroborated harassment incident; law enforcement is called in at the request of the accused/accuser. Action is taken. This does not remove the harasser from the site, nor does it trigger further sanctions against him or her within the community or conference unless such a set of explicit rules is codified.
[1] https://us.pycon.org/2013/about/code-of-conduct/harassment-i...
Telling adults, "Be careful in the words that you choose." does give the code the Code a patina of Political Correctness. I was half expecting the next paragraph to warn me to look both ways before crossing the street.
The Code has a very broad definition of harassment that makes no distinction between a one time comment and a pattern of repetitive behaviour intended to intimidate or cause harm.
I see that "following" is one of the actions that defines harassment. How does that differ from stalking? I assume they are not referring to Twitter.
From what I understand, the code was approved by the Board of Directors of the PSF, and not the PSF as a whole. Please, correct me if I am wrong. This is ironic since one of the Board members was walking around the conference last year with a damaged stuffed python toy asking, "Would you like to see my one eyed snake?"
This was said to one of my female colleagues. I asked her if she would like me to say something and she replied, "No, it is just creepy, but I'm an adult."
The Board's aspiration to create a welcoming environment is laudable and this spirit is very much a part of the Python community. I don't think that the Code, as worded, helps accomplish this. It is overly broad and loosely defined. The result is that it sounds like an attempt to infantilize the attendees and proscribe behaviour that may be part of vigorous exchanges of points of view.
I am sure that this is not what the Board intended, but you would wish for a more articulate expression from a group of engineers who would not tolerate this sense of generality in their code.
I don't need anyone to speak up for me about anything. I'm outspoken enough that if I was actually offended by something I would say something myself. The ridiculous one-eyed snake joke was not ill-intended, nor did I feel harassed, and I'm going to remove myself as an example, here.
Let's not derail the conversation that needs to be had about CoCs. It's a little ridiculous to discount the attempts that are being made to make the community better because one of the directors that helped write it told an off-color joke at a conference that one time.
In spirit it is good idea but they rushed into it and didn't do enough discussion about it before approving the current one.
I was also witness to the one eyed snake board member and to me I thought it was funny and didn't think he was doing any harm but now that the PSF is taking a stance against these types of actions, will the rules hold up against their own?
The first sentence really sets the tone: "At O'Reilly, we assume that most people are intelligent and well-intended, and we're not inclined to tell people what to do"
I guess harassment falls under free speech. My bad dog.
Speech should be free in public AND in private events.
Else you get societies giving lip service to the idea of "free speech" in public, and then destroying the public spaces of discourse.
(How about Google censoring your email or blog? It's their private infrastructure after all).
>I guess harassment falls under free speech.
No, it's just that white Americans have no idea what harassment means. Some guy showing a slide with a bikini model at a Ruby conference was enough to cause a "moral outrage" a couple of years ago.
(And, no, it's not about the relevance of the slide, which meant as a joke: if he had shown something equally non relavant, like a Star Wars joke or a LoTR joke, everybody would have been fine with it).
And I have no problem with how Linus talks, without concern for self-censorship.
Funny how we owe a large of the success of open source (and most of Linux) to a "knuckle-dragging troglodyte"...
(Another tangential point about Linus and language: he is very good at targeting his profanity. He doesn't drop f-bombs every third sentence, he saves them for when they are most effective. I don't think "knuckle-dragging troglodyte" quite applies.)
Free speech, as defined by numerous Supreme Court decisions, protects speech that expresses ideas, however distasteful, but does not tolerate advocating of action that will cause harm, nor statements whose sole purpose is to invoke an altercation--"fighting words".
The clear distinction from Oliver Wendell Holmes is that you can yell, "Fire!", but not in a crowded theatre. Free speech is not without limits.
So you can legally say that someone is ugly, but you cannot advocate assaults on people that you perceive as ugly.