Debugging conference anti-harassment policies [LWN.net]

Debugging conference anti-harassment policies

Posted Feb 1, 2011 16:07 UTC (Tue) by eean (subscriber, #50420)
Parent article: Debugging conference anti-harassment policies

So probably those images would be OK on Australian television. But its not Australian television, is it?

I guess the pink elephant in the room is that this a predominately male conference (actually not sure of this; just making a well-educated guess). Even if thats not the case, I think "workplace rules" should be implemented at such events. It is a bit difficult to think about: for instance sexual harassment of this kind usually implies some sort of on-going problem. But LCA is a on-off thing. However there certainly is plenty of continuity between open source and the open source conferences (I always see the same people all over the world) and we should endeavor to make it a welcome environment for everyone.

So really I don't see this as about separating people into the offended and the offenders. The problem isn't so much about people feeling offended; its about the awkward situation it creates. Its ultimately about creating the culture that we want to be.

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Debugging conference anti-harassment policies

Posted Feb 3, 2011 7:25 UTC (Thu) by ekj (guest, #1524) [Link] (2 responses)

Workplace rules are the wrong set of rules, for the general case. Because many things are to various degree taboo in the workplace, though central to many talks that are totally on-target for an open source conference.

It's not popular in most workplaces, to talk about Freedom. Opression. Choice. To make clear and strong political statements. ("People should be allowed picking apart machines that they legally bought" is a political statement)

Nevertheless, I agree with the workplace-test for *sexual* imagery and phrasing. Few or none of our topics are really *about* sex as such, and so when they are not, it should not be nessecary to use strong sexual imagery for the shock-value.

But I *totally* want to hear strong defences of Freedom, that I'd expect, perversely enough, that most workplaces would consider to controversial.

It's a weakness with the Geek Feminism anti-harassment policy that it confuse offence with harassment. It's totally possible to be offensive, without *harassing* anyone. And not everything that -somebody- doesn't like (or even that make them uncomfortable) is harassment.

We *definitely* want to ban all sorts of harassment.

We equally definitely do NOT want to ban all sorts of offensive (to some!) statements - allthough I guess we probably *do* want to encourage less statements that are both offensive and offtopic.

Making statements that offend the RIAA or that mocks the creators of the DMCA for their handiwork and lacking comittment to freedom, is totally on.

Debugging conference anti-harassment policies

Posted Feb 3, 2011 14:19 UTC (Thu) by eean (subscriber, #50420) [Link]

Yep fully agree. There are some fine threads to walk, but also some things clearly out of bounds.

Debugging conference anti-harassment policies

Posted Feb 11, 2011 9:02 UTC (Fri) by Seegras (guest, #20463) [Link]

> Nevertheless, I agree with the workplace-test
> for *sexual* imagery and phrasing.

You imply that there is any consensus on what
"workplace-rules" are.

I'm constantly baffled by "Not Workplace Safe"-
disclaimers in blogs and news sites, and concluded
that this "workplace" they're referring to must be
somewhere else, probably in the USA.

So you've got exactly the same underlying cultural
differences as everywhere else, and as are mentioned
by various commenters in this thread. There's apparently
a vast difference between Europe and the USA, and we
haven't even mentioned Japan yet.

Speaking of looking at porn in the workplace: I used
to work at a large webhosting company, which had
porn-sites among it's customers. Of course you sometimes
had to look at porn to help them debug their php-problem.