Hi Russell,
What would you like to recommend to LCA 2012 that they do?
Perhaps you have some concrete suggestions?
On Mon, Jan 31, 2011 at 6:13 PM, Russell Stuart
<russell-lca at stuart.id.au> wrote:
> I have been itching to contribute to the discussion on the Mark Pesce
> talk, but have resisted doing so because I was a highly visible part of
> LCA 2011 team and I didn't want to be seen to speak on behalf of the
> conference, nor Linux Australia. ?Now that LCA 2011 is safely over I'll
> put in my 2c worth.
>
> When I first read the proposed Geek Feminism Anti-Harassment policy I
> was two minds about it. ?On the one hand it was performing an important
> task in keeping the Norin / Florian incident fresh in our minds.
> Anything that drove the anti-harassment message out to a wider audience
> was a very good thing. ?On the other hand, I thought the policy was both
> ill-conceived and poorly written. ?It reminded me of some of the
> similarly ill-conceived and poorly written laws that have followed 9/11.
> So when some of my fellow team members proposed LCA 2011 adopt it I
> resisted strongly. ?I didn't prevail, obviously.
>
> Nonetheless after it was pointed out that Mark talk had violated the
> policy, I was one of those saying we must apologise. ?We had made a
> promise, we had broken it and so an apology was in order. ?In fact had
> we had our wits about us that morning, there were would have been no
> need for an apology. ?We had developed internal procedures for enforcing
> the policy which naturally flowed from it. ?Those procedures said Mark's
> talk should have stopped when it became evident it violated the policy.
> Given we had adopted the policy, I fully endorsed those procedures and
> their implementation. ?I don't know why they weren't followed for Mark's
> talk. ?Perhaps it was because it was at the end of a long week. ?But had
> it occurred there would no doubt have been a hue and cry that makes the
> current one pale into insignificance, and I would found myself in the
> unenviable position of having to defend the person who taken an action
> that I personal find intensely distasteful.
>
> So what is wrong with the Geek Feminism Anti-Harassment policy?
>
> Firstly it is poorly targeted. ?Mark's talk wasn't harassing anybody.
> (Well nobody at the conference anyway. ?Perhaps some authorities in
> Egypt felt harassed by it.) ?Nor did it encourage harassment. ?(Any
> suggestion that someone felt that Mark's presentation gave them
> permission to put their hand up someone's skirt, or worse yet encouraged
> it, is clearly absurd.) ?Yet somehow a talk that didn't harass anybody
> got king hit by this policy that supposedly targets only harassment. ?At
> the very least, it is a glaring bug.
>
> Secondly it gives the more radical attendees a lot of hammers to hit the
> conference organisers over the head with. ?Get pissed off with someone
> and don't want them in the same bar as you? ?Claim that are harassing
> you by following. ?Don't like someone in photocomp doing portrait
> studies at rego? ?Claim it is "harassing photography" (circular
> definition?). ?Take offence at a picture? ?Claim it is "sexual content".
> It's all allowed for under the this particular policy which defines a
> grab bag things (10's of them) as harassment. ?None are well defined.
> For example it is not clear when following becomes harassing, nor when
> an image is sexual. ?Now that I have organised a conference, I can
> authoritatively say handing these ideas out is not necessary as
> attendees are perfectly capable of thinking them up on their own.
> Worse, you are now lending authority to those claims with your own
> words.
>
> Thirdly, from what I could tell Geek Feminism policy wasn't just about
> stopping harassment. ?It was also about forcing open source conferences
> to adopt the Geek Feminist view on what harassment is. ?We know this
> because LCA 2011 already had a strong anti-harassment policy in its
> terms and conditions, inherited from previous LCA's. ?It gives us
> permission to do what we dammed well please when harassment occurs.
> What's more, LCA has a history of using those permissions to throwing
> people behaving inappropriately out of the conference. ?And as hindsight
> now tells us it doesn't contain bug the Geek Feminism one does. ?So why
> ask LCA 2011 to adopt it? ?Well, the only substantial difference between
> the documents is the Geek Feminism one spells out what they define as
> harassment. ?The issue I have with that is the society I happen to live
> in already defines that in a way that is seemingly acceptable to the
> vast majority of people who live within it. ?And obviously it is better
> written, as authored by lawyers and whatnot who do it as a day job, and
> it is better vetted as it has been through the political treadmill we
> subject most of our ?Australian laws to. ?I am not sure why as a
> conference organiser I am asked to use a different definition.
>
> Fourthly, I am fairly certain the Geek Feminism policy is an ice berg.
> The bit you were meant to see was the anti-harassment stuff, and it was
> noisily pointed to. ?The berg underneath was the attempt to control what
> could and could not be said at a geek conference - ie censorship. ?This
> was openly stated to me by some who worked on the policy. ?The spin was
> "we want to make open source conferences a place where women can feel
> comfortable". ?The underlying message was they intended to achieve this
> by banning words and images they found personally distasteful. ?I happen
> to be a current member of the EFA (a sister organisation to the EFF) of
> some years standing, I took a small role in the EFA's campaign against
> Australian internet filter, and so I recognise the arguments in favour
> of censorship. ?This is one of them. ?The motivations for such arguments
> are usually good (just as they almost certainly are in this case), the
> justifications put forward in support of them are always sound pure, but
> as in this case the cure is dangerously simplistic and frankly puerile.
>
> To state the obvious, the conference organises can't protect you from
> bad talks. ?Since isn't always clear where on the good/bad scale a talk
> will finish up until it ends, what hope do the papers committee have
> when they look at it 6 months before it starts? ?But should you find
> yourself listening to a bad talk, there is a simple solution. ?It is the
> same one all anti-censorship people give. ?If you don't like it, stop
> listening and leave. ? ?No one is forcing you to be there. ?You don't
> need the conferences organisers to act as a nanny state for you. ?If
> enough people do that, you can be reasonably certain the speaker won't
> be invited along next year. ?If no one else does, then perhaps its you
> and not the talk.
>
> Which brings me to my final frustration with this entire saga. ?One of
> the roles of LCA organisers is to bring popular, enlightening and if we
> get very lucky even inspiring talks. ?By two measure's Mark Pesce's talk
> was one of those. ?It received one of the longest, it not the longest
> acclamation of any talk at LCA 2011. ?And if the chatter on our lists is
> any guide, it caused more people to stop, think and act than any other
> talk. ?And yet we have a small minority of people who evidently take
> offence at images and words that would be perfectly acceptable on
> Australia broadcast TV, and are now suggesting the vast bulk of the LCA
> attendees who enjoyed the talk should not have been allowed to see it
> because they object to it. ?And they got very close to achieving just
> that.
>
> They did so because we adopted the Geek Feminism policy. ?The banning of
> overwhelmingly popular talks such as this would be positively harmful to
> LCA and indeed to any conference that adopts it. ?At they very least, I
> believe all conference organisers should avoid using it until it gets
> substantially re-worked.
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Chat mailing list
> Chat at lca2011.linux.org.au
> http://lists.followtheflow.org/mailman/listinfo/chat
>
Received on Mon Jan 31 2011 - 18:53:43 GMT