[diversity-talk] anti-harassment policy at SotM

[Jon]

On 24/06/2013 18:13, Alan McConchie wrote:
> Someone at the SotMUS birds of a feather session was involved in organizing SotM 2013, and mentioned something about resistance to having an anti-harassment policy. Unfortunately, I don't remember who said this, or what were the details of this situation.
>
> Perhaps someone who was at the BoF session remembers more specifics?

Hello, that was me. The discussion at the meeting didn't go into 
specifics, so here's the background.

SotM has never had an anti-harassment policy before. As an organiser of 
a couple of conferences in the past, I've seen some harassment problems, 
and this was especially brought to the front of my mind by the 
full-blown community meltdown following this year's PyCon in March. For 
background on this, see for example:
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/03/how-dongle-jokes-got-two-people-fired-and-led-to-ddos-attacks/ 

and
http://plasticbag.org/archives/2013/03/on-being-grown-ups-about-childish-behaviour 


I proposed a wording to the SotM team which I put together by looking at 
the anti harassment policies of a lot of con websites. It gave some 
examples of what harassment might look like, and made it clear that if 
someone tells you that you are harassing them (with examples) you must stop.

I was surprised to find that almost everyone who engaged in the 
discussion opposed this. The opposition included such arguments as:
- it's too negative, it will put people off coming (I'm not sure who)
- there's never been a problem before (that we know of) so there 
probably never will be
- discrimination is illegal so we don't need to do anything (just rely 
on calling the police, presumably)
- free speech is protected so we can't legally do anything further
- we have no power to enforce anything outside the conference venue so 
we shouldn't try inside
- if we give examples of harassment people will take that as a 
definitive list and feel free to do anything not included on it
- there is no need for a policy because we can always rely on the 
community "to enforce norms"

My view is that if we can prevent even one person from being harassed, 
by making it clear to the potential harasser that specific things would 
be uncacceptable, then having the policy would be worth it, but 
ultimately I wasn't supported by anyone else on the team. In the end we 
came up with the compromise wording which you can see on the website, 
which I think is better than nothing, but too vague since it contains no 
examples. In fact, it didn't even include the word "harassment" until 
the very final draft, only "discrimination". In the final form it says 
that harassment is unacceptable, but gives no clues as to what we think 
harassment actually is. Still, I think this is good progress, and maybe 
it will be improved on in future years.

I'm not at all accusing my co-organisers as being in favour of allowing 
harassment or being sexist (etc) themselves. We had long since, and with 
little or no input from me, identified that SotM is white-male dominated 
and committed ourselves to acting to redress this. I think that they're 
just, being mostly white straight able-bodied males themselves, not 
aware of or interested in the privilege they enjoy or the impact 
harassment can have on the victim.

I believe that, while OSM is currently straight-white-ablebodied-male 
dominated, most of them are very open to hearing from the less 
privileged - there just hasn't been a channel for that before. My hope 
is that this group will provide one.

Jon.



>
> On Jun 23, 2013, at 4:23 PM, Richard Weait wrote:
>
>> On Friday, 14 June 2013, Alan said:
>>
>> "For example, the international State of the Map conference (in
>> Birmingham, UK, from Sept 6-8) is in its final planning stages, and
>> there has been some push-back against instituting a formal
>> anti-harrasment policy at the conference. The diversity-talk mailing
>> list will be an important site to organize in support of initiatives
>> like these." [1]
>>
>> Alan, it seems that there is an anti-harassment statement on the State
>> of the Map web site. [2]  What was the nature of the push-back you
>> mention?
>>
>> [1] in http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/diversity-talk/2013-June/000007.html
>> [2] http://2013.stateofthemap.org/info/booking/
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> diversity-talk mailing list
>> diversity-talk at openstreetmap.org
>> http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/diversity-talk