I don't get it

Posted Dec 1, 2010 23:59 UTC (Wed) by xtifr (guest, #143)
In reply to: I don't get it by jackb
Parent article: The dark side of open source conferences

A lot of people have pointed out negative issues with calling the police, but there's another factor you're ignoring here, Jack. There's a lot of behavior that falls short of "sexual assault or solicit[ing] prostitution"--behavior that is not illegal, but is <em>absolutely</em> unacceptable in civilized society. To pick a non-sexual example, using the "N" word would hardly be the basis for any sort of police involvement, but it's far beyond the bounds of acceptable behavior for many (I hope most) of us.

If a woman is left with no recourse but to call the police, then any behavior that falls short of illegal is tacitly accepted. But I don't accept it! If you can suggest something <em>besides</em> a code of conduct that would cover behavior in the range between acceptable and outright illegal, I'm all ears, but until then, I'm all in favor of Val's suggestion or something like it.

I don't get it

Posted Dec 2, 2010 0:07 UTC (Thu) by jackb (guest, #41909) [Link] (7 responses)

The thing that the world is full of jerks (of both genders). You can't legislate them out of existence and when people are determined to be a jerk they'll find a way to do it no matter what kind of rules you try to apply to prevent it.

When you find yourself (no matter your gender) dealing with a jerk your options are basically as follows: ignore it, deal with it yourself or complain about it. If you reach adulthood without learning how to deal with the jerks yourself then that's really your own problem.

It would be great if that skill wasn't necessary but wishing that jerks didn't exist in the world isn't going to make it so. If people would focus more on standing up for themselves rather than appealing to authority figures they'd make a lot more progress.

I don't get it

Posted Dec 2, 2010 0:29 UTC (Thu) by AndreE (guest, #60148) [Link]

Ummm

No one is legislating against anything.

We are applying our right to self selection.

People are free to be jerks, and others are free to ignore them and exclude them from their community

I don't get it

Posted Dec 2, 2010 2:01 UTC (Thu) by njs (guest, #40338) [Link] (3 responses)

> If people would focus more on standing up for themselves rather than appealing to authority figures they'd make a lot more progress.

Really? Because authority figures have, you know, authority. I mean, standing up for yourself is a fine thing to do, but there's a limit to what you can do as a random attendee, and I don't see how it'd be some moral failing to ask the organizers to do their damn job. If someone is harassing people, the appropriate response is to kick them out, and I can't do that, but the conference organizers can (and should). Or would you prefer, like, some sort of vigilante justice?

The fact is, in a conference setting, some people have more authority than others. So those people have to make a choice. They can use that authority to back up the jerks (e.g., by egging them on from the podium or just ignoring legitimate complaints) or to back up the non-jerks (e.g. by kicking out people who harass others and not inviting them back).

And the nature of authority is that whichever option they pick is likely to have much more of an effect on how the conference turns out than whatever I do. So in practice, telling attendees that they should stand up for themselves and stop whining means (1) you're saying that it's okay for people with authority to back up the jerks, and (2) it's the responsibility of individual (female) attendees to take on not just the jerks, but the whole conference apparatus.

I don't get it

Posted Dec 2, 2010 9:49 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (2 responses)

Or would you prefer, like, some sort of vigilante justice?

I cannot imagine how horrifying libertarian conferences must be (if there are enough libertarians even in the US to have conferences of any kind).

I don't get it

Posted Dec 3, 2010 14:01 UTC (Fri) by RussNelson (guest, #27730) [Link] (1 responses)

Hehe, you don't actually know any libertarians, do you? Libertarians are fine with rules ... they just want the rules to be voluntarily agreed-upon. In the case of a conference or a meeting, there are rules. Break the rules, and get the punishment ... or don't attend in the first place. THAT is how libertarians work in the real world (rather than your fantasy libertarians).

I don't get it

Posted Dec 5, 2010 1:16 UTC (Sun) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Oh, I know quite a lot of them. Every one says something different and says that the *others* are not real libertarians. You are about opinion fifty.

Adult harassment victims did nothing wrong

Posted Dec 2, 2010 2:50 UTC (Thu) by JanC_ (guest, #34940) [Link]

> If you reach adulthood without learning how to deal with the jerks
> yourself then that's really your own problem.

What you are saying is that adult victims of any kind of harassment (be it sexual harassment at open source conferences, bullying at work, war rape, ...) have to deal with it on their own, because it's their own fault?

I don't get it

Posted Dec 2, 2010 4:24 UTC (Thu) by james_w (guest, #51167) [Link]

> and when people are determined to be a jerk they'll find a way to do it no matter what kind of rules you try to apply to prevent it.

True, but we can make it very difficult for them to do it at our conferences.

This isn't about stopping everyone in the world from being jerks, this is about keeping it out of our conferences, so that a minority don't spoil them for everyone else, and prevent us from getting more contributors.

One jerk can do a lot of damage, including stopping 10 or 100 people from contributing to a project or attending a conference.

James

I don't get it

Posted Dec 2, 2010 0:16 UTC (Thu) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (19 responses)

replying to you in particular, but to many posts in this thread in general.

complaints on these issues need to be separated between the clearly illegal (putting hands down someone's pants for example) where the right thing to do _is_ to call the cops (after all, what can the organisers do other than to call the cops on your behalf, but if you aren't willing to talk to the cops about the issue, there's not much that the organisers can do about it) and the ones that are 'setting a bad tone' by insinuation.

mixing them up doesn't really help, if for no other reason than that the people who are just setting the bad tone are going to look at this and say "I'm not doing that sort of thing" and continue to ignore the things that they are doing that are merely offending people.

I don't get it

Posted Dec 2, 2010 0:35 UTC (Thu) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link] (16 responses)

"after all, what can the organisers do other than to call the cops on your behalf, but if you aren't willing to talk to the cops about the issue, there's not much that the organisers can do about it"

There's plenty the organisers can do. They can eject the individual concerned. They can prevent them from attending the conference in future. They can let other conference organisers know what trouble they had and how they dealt with it. They can make it clear that this kind of behaviour is not tolerated. They are in no way bound by a requirement that law enforcement be involved, and if they insist on that then they are failing in their duty towards their attendees.

It's a scale. Some inappropriate acts can be dealt with by simply taking the person concerned aside and suggesting that they modify their behaviour. Other acts are sufficiently serious that the involvement of law enforcement may be required even if the victim isn't willing to do so themselves. But they're different extremes of the same thing, and talking about both in the same context isn't mixing things up.

I don't get it

Posted Dec 2, 2010 2:07 UTC (Thu) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (15 responses)

ejecting people opens the organisers up to lawsuits from the people being ejected. How many people are willing to accept that sort of liability?

and please don't say that false accusations never happen, it's been very clearly proven that they do (and to be clear, I am in no way stating or implying that the people interviewed for this article are in any way misstating what actually happened)

I don't get it

Posted Dec 2, 2010 2:41 UTC (Thu) by njs (guest, #40338) [Link] (2 responses)

*Not* ejecting people also opens organizers up to lawsuits from the people being harassed. (Especially when the harasser is a repeat offender that everyone knows about but ignores anyway. Even if we ignore the *ethical* aspects here, that'd be a *far* more difficult lawsuit to defend against.)

And, for that matter, pretty much everything else involved in running a conference *also* opens one up to lawsuits -- e.g., guess who's on the hook if some attendees trash the venue.

So we have standard ways to deal with this -- written policies (if the form when you signed up said "attendance may be revoked on whim of organizers" then you hardly have a legal leg to stand up if your attendance did get revoked), and running the conference under the auspices of a limited liability corporation with a civil liability insurance policy.

This is all so standard that when I see the liability argument I always feel like the person advancing it is just trying to find some logical justification to back up their gut reaction. Sorry if that's not the case here, but that's how I feel.

I don't get it

Posted Dec 2, 2010 7:14 UTC (Thu) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (1 responses)

I was in San Jose (Silicon Valley) a few weeks ago, and the hotel I was staying at apparently has problems with weekend parties.

they had a written policy that they apparently hand out to guests staying for the weekend talking about eviction if there are noise complaints.

one interesting thing about this was that it wasn't hotel security that would evict them. The hotel would call the police and have the police evict them.

If you want to throw someone out and make it stick, you really should involve the professionals, either police or other local security personnel.

if someone is merely misbehaving, telling them to calm down, but the off-color jokes, etc is very definitely appropriate for anyone who witnesses the bad behavior to do (definitely NOT limited to event staff), but if you are talking about behavior bad enough to throw someone out (the abuse/assault level of behavior) that is a different story.

I don't get it

Posted Dec 3, 2010 5:19 UTC (Fri) by njs (guest, #40338) [Link]

Dunno what your hotel story has to do with anything? Are we just changing the subject from talking about the liability risks of throwing people out to talking about the exact mechanisms that should be used to do it?

Anyone who's running a conference should hopefully be competent enough to handle this kind of situation in an appropriate manner; whether that involves calling the cops is going to be situation dependent, but it's certainly an option.

I don't get it

Posted Dec 2, 2010 3:19 UTC (Thu) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link] (3 responses)

"ejecting people opens the organisers up to lawsuits from the people being ejected. How many people are willing to accept that sort of liability?"

Really? The terms and conditions for most conferences I've signed up to make it clear that the organisers are free to eject me if they see fit. What's the worst that can happen? Refunding of admission fee on a pro-rata basis?

"and please don't say that false accusations never happen, it's been very clearly proven that they do (and to be clear, I am in no way stating or implying that the people interviewed for this article are in any way misstating what actually happened)"

False accusations happen. It's a dreadful reality, and I feel deeply for anyone who's been affected by it. But it's a minority of situations, and while it's true that a false accusation can affect someone's life, so does sexual assault. Working on the assumption that accusations are false until proven true protects may be fine for a criminal justice system, but in a community it hurts a small number of innocents while harming a large number of innocents. If I sexually assault someone in a back room at a conference, without any witnesses, what do you expect law enforcement to do? What do you expect the outcome of me continuing to attend and speak at conferences to be? Is my victim ever going to be enthusiastic about showing up to any event I'm presenting at? Is anyone that my victim ever speaks to?

There's a straightforward way to avoid false accusations. Behave in a manner such that nobody believes you're capable of anything you're accused of. It turns out that people predisposed to inappropriate behaviour generally manage to creep out other people beforehand.

I don't get it

Posted Dec 2, 2010 4:38 UTC (Thu) by bfields (subscriber, #19510) [Link] (1 responses)

"But it's a minority of situations"

Yes, and what on earth does it have to do with having an anti-harassment policy, anyway? Organizers can ask people to leave now, and probably have to every now and then. They could do it on flimsy pretenses already.

This is silly.

All this carping about procedure is beside the point--if there were a pattern of people running around conferences giving wedgies, and the organizers said "cut that out, or you're not welcomed", we wouldn't be having this argument.

The real argument is over whether you should feel like you screwed up because you used a "slide of bikini-clad women" for some throwaway joke. So, go browse around the wiki a little, and come back and argue specific points if you really want to.

Meanwhile, you consider this just a matter of a few thin-skinned people being "offended", and you resent being asked to visit some confusing alien ultra-politically-correct culture--fine, so just take this all as a sort of guide to the quaint customs of our culture. They're not that hard, honest. And stop worrying that you're going to be booted out for some minor slip-up--unless you're totally nuts, the worst that's going to happen is you'll have the slightly uncomfortable experience of somebody in a staff t-shirt asking you to stop doing something....

I don't get it

Posted Dec 2, 2010 6:27 UTC (Thu) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]

you are very much putting words in my mouth.

I was talking strictly about the assault-level events

I don't get it

Posted Dec 2, 2010 9:08 UTC (Thu) by KSteffensen (guest, #68295) [Link]

"There's a straightforward way to avoid false accusations. Behave in a manner such that nobody believes you're capable of anything you're accused of. It turns out that people predisposed to inappropriate behaviour generally manage to creep out other people beforehand."

In Denmark where I live, for the last couple of years we've had quite a high focus on peadophilia in daycare centers, sports communities, boy scouts, etc. Since peadophilia is such a horrible crime and so hard to prove conclusively in a court, an accusation of peadophilia is enough to ruin a persons life, even though the accused is acquitted in court. This leads to a situation where men I know refuse to do paid or charity work in these settings, for the fear of being accused of touching the children.

Behaving in a manner such that nobody believes you're capable of anything you're accused of is not necessarily as straightforward as you say.

I don't get it

Posted Dec 2, 2010 3:43 UTC (Thu) by vaurora (subscriber, #38407) [Link] (2 responses)

A conference is a private event. Generally speaking, the organizers have as much legal right to eject someone from a conference as you do to kick someone out of your house. If you are a conference organizer, it's your party, you can invite - or kick out - anyone you like.

Hm, I feel like I wrote this before. Oh, that's because I did!

http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Anti-harassment_policy...

(Search for "private event.")

I don't get it

Posted Dec 2, 2010 17:06 UTC (Thu) by sorpigal (guest, #36106) [Link] (1 responses)

Having taken time to actually read this link I am now confused. Is this the policy referenced in TFA? It seems like it would be better described as an Anti-Harassment HOWTO for conference organizers, a thing which clearly would be beneficial and not at all harmful. Describing it as a "policy" and referencing the Ubuntu code of conduct suggests that this is some kind of affidavit that each attendee would have to agree to live by, which sounds draconian and unreasonable.

I don't get it

Posted Dec 2, 2010 18:17 UTC (Thu) by maco (guest, #53641) [Link]

No, the one in TFA is: http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Conference_anti-harass...

You're right that the one she linked in the comments is just an explanation of anti-harassment policies and issues surrounding them.

I don't get it

Posted Dec 2, 2010 5:51 UTC (Thu) by stewart (subscriber, #50665) [Link]

> ejecting people opens the organisers up to lawsuits from the people being > ejected. How many people are willing to accept that sort of liability?

Just about all of them.

Those that aren't, I don't want to go to.

I don't get it

Posted Dec 7, 2010 15:16 UTC (Tue) by sez (guest, #71571) [Link] (3 responses)

Ejecting people opens $conf up to lawsuits. Where is your evidence for this claim?

Sounds like FUD to me.

Certainly for our conference our insurance policy explicitly *does not cover* claims under molestation, so if someone experiences that at our conference and we have done nothing to prevent it, we are wide open to being sued.

But as far as ejecting people goes - no problem.

False complaint?? What are you talking about?

This is not a kangaroo court, no-ones being charged with anything here. If the worst possible thing happens under this policy and the person gets ejected, too bad - so sad, they go back to work and tell their buddies whatever they want. Its a minor inconvenience.

If the conf organisers don't eject them and the offender goes on to grope and harass more people, the class action lawsuit, not covered by insurance is going to go as high as the national debt.

You want to pay for that?

I don't get it

Posted Dec 7, 2010 19:20 UTC (Tue) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (2 responses)

if you refund the person's air fare, hotel, and conference registration, then it can approach 'too bad, so sad' but even then it's not a non-event.

your opinion seems to be 'better to punish a hundred innocent people by throwing them out than to miss throwing out one bad person', aka a presumption of guilt.

At least in the US, this is not how things are supposed to work.

I don't get it

Posted Dec 7, 2010 20:30 UTC (Tue) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link]

I think you're mistaking judicial process and a private event.

I don't get it

Posted Dec 7, 2010 20:31 UTC (Tue) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]

Where did sez talk about throwing out hundreds of people?

I don't get it

Posted Dec 2, 2010 2:28 UTC (Thu) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75) [Link]

I think it's important to keep the plainly illegal actions separate from the merely obnoxious ones in terms of how we respond to them, but not to the point that we treat them as completely separate issues. They aren't. Bad behavior is self reinforcing. You can bet the plainly illegal behavior is far more common at events where simple obnoxiousness is tolerated than at events where any level of sexism is considered unacceptable.

And the less egregious behavior is an area where the community can really do something. If you think somebody is setting a bad tone, don't just shrug it off because it doesn't affect you. Challenge them on it.

I don't get it

Posted Dec 2, 2010 10:27 UTC (Thu) by [email protected] (guest, #14112) [Link]

"after all, what can the organisers do other than to call the cops on your behalf, but if you aren't willing to talk to the cops about the issue, there's not much that the organisers can do about it"

Their first responsibility is to avoid this situation happening in the first place.