I don't get it [LWN.net]

I don't get it

Posted Dec 2, 2010 3:19 UTC (Thu) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239)
In reply to: I don't get it by dlang
Parent article: The dark side of open source conferences

"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.

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I don't get it

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

"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 9:08 UTC (Thu) by KSteffensen (subscriber, #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.