Why CoC

gistfile1.txt

Hi <redacted>,

most people behave great, no question. I know I do and I believe you do too.

However there’s always a few idiots that don’t. In the past, they mostly
got away with it and people like you or me never heard of it. Because it
weren’t our problems and the victims mostly didn’t report it. And if
they did, the organizers mostly shrugged it away: "it’s not against the
law to be a creepy asshole"

For some fresh examples what women endure on tech conferences have a
look at:
http://singlevoice.net/2012/07/12/sexism-redyellow-cards-at-defcon/ How
would you feel if people would sneak up from behind an try to lick your
shoulder? How excited would you be attend more conferences if such
things happened to you?

Now, people that have ever been affected by stuff like that (or heard
that such stuff is happening) are unlikely to visit a tech conference.
You can keep talking that we’re nice and not like the others. But a)
it’s naive, we have incidents too, we just don’t learn about them (I
did, because I spent some time with Giovanni at the last EP) b) they
don’t want to risk it. tech confs simply have that stigma of creepiness.

So what do you do – assuming you’re interested getting more diversity?
You write a CoC which contains basically what 99.9% of all attendees do
anyway and pledge to enforce it. You pledge, that if someone feels
harassed, you take them serious. It doesn’t meant you support witch
hunts and finger pointing though! There are no automatisms, it’s the
call of the conf organizers to decide.

So on one hand it’s a symbolic way to tell those that have been affected
that we care and will take care of them if something happens. On the
other hand it’s a formal tool to put sanctions on people damaging our
community by bad behavior.

Together with outreach initiatives it proved to be a great way to raise
the diversity at conferences.

So put simply: the CoC is not for and not for me. Ideally it doesn’t
affect us at all. But for people that has been harassed/discriminated
before or are afraid to be in the future it’s a firm statement that we
will take care of them. The biggest problem of selling CoCs is that they
solve problems the majority (white men) doesn’t have and it takes
empathy and walking in other’s shoes to get it.

If you prefer to read a native speaker (and author of Django and the
PyCon CoC), have a look at:
http://jacobian.org/writing/codes-of-conduct/

I hope you see the value now.

-h