Codes of conduct and the trade-offs of copyleft

What a fascinating post. I know nothing about the topic but I’ll be following the comments with interest.

Thanks for the post, Sumana. Just a teensy quibble, you have a broken link under “a big company can hamstring the larger community by closing access to new tests”. Feel free to delete this comment once you’ve seen it.

Hmm, how can Liberal Arts types take over the running of spaces dominated by STEM types?

I know! Complain of “microagressions” and say they need “governance processes” which you can then run, since you aren’t capable of the STEM stuff, and since they aren’t interested in your pretended problems they probably won’t notice until you are running the place…

It’s very funny really, almost as if there is an entire category of human beings who are automagically categorized as “Liberal Arts types” who are “incapable of the STEM stuff,” even when they’re programmers who have spent umpteen years working on important FLOSS projects. And, who keep on invading spaces where STEM types want to be left alone to do their studly stuff in peace. And who spread cooties, a special variety of cooties. I just can’t help but think that there’s something that this category of people have in common (apart from the cooties and unwillingness to recognize their proper place), even if I somehow just can’t put my finger on it …

No matter what FLOSS license a project chooses, copyleft or permissive, the project is restricting the freedom of contributors — they can’t incorporate code into the project under an incompatible license. In this way a permissive license is more restrictive than a copyleft license, and public domain more restrictive yet.

So the suggested first step (which I like) of getting communities to consider restrictions they already accept when thinking about things like codes of conduct should be workable regardless of license.

Copyleft attempts to regulate what entities do with code outside of the community producing the code. The post mentions that codes of conduct are usually bounded to particular community spaces. It seems to me that a copyleft equivalent code of conduct would make requirements of participant behavior outside of community spaces.

In my experience, ‘Niamh’ rhymes with ‘Kiev’, but the ‘e’ is more like a schwa, and stress on the first syllable.

I feel like there’s a degree of “subblogging” going on here, isn’t it?

The big elephant in the room is, that perhaps the single most influential person in the world of FLOSS, Linus Torvald, is, uhm, kind of a dick: http://www.businessinsider.com/linux-foundation-reigns-in-linus-torvalds-2015-3 (there are better links, but this is an OK summary that was easy to find). I’m assuming that the fact that this post coincides with the establishment of a code of conduct by the linux foundation is not a coincidence.

The problem, of course, it not just Linus, but the fact that there is a hoard of much lesser programmers in the FLOSS community who take the same attitude (and most of them without the (alleged) ability of Linus to distinguish between people who can take his abuse and those who don’t).

What I find interesting about this from a political economy point of view is that it’s actually corporate players who may play a beneficial role here. Sarah Sharp, who called out Linus on his abusive language back in 2013, was at that time working for Intel, a company with a very good reputation for diversity (as far as the tech industry is concerned). More generally, mature[1] tech companies like Intel or Google spend much more time and energy thinking about and investing in diversity, they do a much better job at keeping people from being jerks than the FLOSS movement.
Spinning off what Sumana is writing, the reason for that is that they have proper governance. Much of FLOSS doesn’t.

Now, I’m writing this very much as a FLOSS insider (and while I think in the two projects I’m mainly involved with we do very well on the not-being-a-jerk front, we’re doing very poorly on attracting female or non-white devs), so this is not a “yay corporations, take that you dirty hippies” post. It’s more of a sorrowful note.
It also points to where I think change is going to come from: more _formal_ governance. And that requires resources, which are very frequently just not there for FLOSS.

Re adam.smith @16, I don’t think Linus is the elephant in the room here. He’s very visible, but he has been similarly visible for most of the last 20 years without prompting anyone to call for Codes of Conduct.

I think the CoC question has arisen largely from incidents of sexual harassment, mostly in person at conferences. Software development communities have been forced to confront the fact that they contain people who commit harassment and, absent a CoC, there’s really no effective way of policing that. I don’t think that rudeness alone would have caused this to become such a concern for so many people.

This also has a bearing on Sumana’s distinction between contracts and governance; contracts explicitly restrict acts which are simply unpardonable – not sharing the source code to your modified version of a GPL-licensed project, sexually assaulting someone at a conference – because everyone agrees that those things are wrong and we feel confident that we can agree up-front that there can never be any extenuating circumstances in which those things are actually OK. Governance, however, can serve to ‘nudge’ people away from bad behaviours – poor coding standards, rudeness on mailing lists – by giving us a standard to measure those things against without enumerating every possible violation of the standard. A governance procedure can take context into account, and is much more easily subject to improvement and revision than a contract is. (Re-licensing a software project with hundreds of copyright holders is almost impossible).

Could you point to any sites documenting the instances of harassment, Stephenson-quoter kun?

“the existence of a CoC failed to prevent a bad outcome for all concerned.”

As far as I know, though, the woman is the only one who has not been able to find another job.

A very practiced set of standard opening moves from Ben, there. I suspect the Hugo Awards post has drawn attention from the nastier bits of Redddit or the chans.

“me,” –> “men,”

Heat, kitchen, relative temperatures.

@16

There’s no doubt there are a lot of jerks in the tech world. (I like to compare programmers to actors in terms of having their own unique way of interacting with others, and I mean that with affection.) Ther are also a lot of valid issues surrounding the organization of work and the difference between being a hobbyist, to use an old fashioned term, and contributing for a market of non technical users. The OP strikes me as a helpful contribution to the discussion about these issues. She is not calling for replacing the judgment of techie types with liberal arts majors (I have a liberal arts CS degree myself), any more than with business majors or journalism majors or law majors or theater majors or psychology majors. Or any other group that might have “cooties.”

@Adam.smith:

I don’t think the dichotomy you make between the FLOSS world and the corporate world holds up any more (disclaimer: I’m part of the latter, and only fitfully part of the former). You highlight the Linux Foundation, and as I’m sure you know, 80% of contributions to the Linux kernel are made by people in the course of their employment, and the Linux Foundation list of members includes many major corporations.

But I agree with you that corporations can play a role. The emergence of corporate standards and non-discrimination policies have come about, in part, because of government pressure on private industry. Meanwhile — and I admit I’m guessing a bit here — it seems that some (corporate-employed) open source developers resist the extension of workplace rules into their “community” spaces. So Linux Foundation members, who hold those purse strings, could certainly exert pressure.

Meanwhile — and I admit I’m guessing a bit here — it seems that some (corporate-employed) open source developers resist the extension of workplace rules into their “community” spaces. So Linux Foundation members, who hold those purse strings, could certainly exert pressure.

Yah, and I’d similarly guess some corporate workers resist the extension of a sharing ethos into their workplace. So there’s that. Though maybe not on-topic.

Stephenson-quoter-kun: obviously there is going to be tension between people who are happy with current informal structures and people who want to change them in any way–even if only to codify officially norms that most people would agree with generally, but may feel don’t need propping up with a heavy hand. I think a lot of the conflict comes down to the conservative side (just meaning unwilling to change here) seeing those who want to introduce rules that will change things as “outsiders.” In Ben’s case this means girls English Majors (?). Naturally, for the greatest part, the people wanting the changes are part of the community because otherwise they wouldn’t care. For these people, who have been ill-served by existing norms, the suggestion that they are not “real” community members is particularly irritating. It’s precisely this overlooking and dismissal the rules are meant to address, after all. But then it’s true people outside the community can be invested: to take a related example, looking at CS and seeing fewer women majors than in the 1980s makes everyone want to reverse a trend which is…manifestly stupid. Within coding communities there does need to be broad support for rules to work well. I think the challenge would be to get people who care about a given community together and have them agree on some basic norms. In all likelihood they would share plenty. It’s too bad such a heavy us vs them SJWs vs the plain people of the internet is going on. Depressing.

You, know I’ve been intrigued by the way anti-management sentiment has transitioned so smoothly into anti-woman sentiment. In the old days, I didn’t think twice about the fact that resentment against the marketing department was expressed as disdain for the way they dressed, and not much more than twice about the fact that if I wanted to fit in, I needed to dress less well at work than I’d probably do to go to the mall (still better than many of the men in my group, I always wore shoes, say). It might have something to do with the fact that I just don’t have a strong sense of personal fashion–I worry whether clothes signal too high or low a class status, are too cool for me to pull off, and so on–though OTOH a very well dressed (though probably also self-conscious) friend of mine could be absolutely scathing about others’ dressing like management when they weren’t. Now it’s apparently just assumed that the primary workplace conflict between odd engineers and the “normal” world is between men and women. I wonder sometimes how that happened.

“MPAVictoria, Well the upside is Belle has forfeit any right to be offended ever again by anything anyone says ever! So I guess I can now relax on that score at least.”

Shorter Ben- I am too stupid to tell the difference between “bad” language and something truly offensive.

Shorter MPAVictoria: “Look at me, I’m Ben, aren’t I stupid”.

I was taken aback – the reaction you atrributed to me (“Well I do declare! *clutches pearls. Faints.”) is essentially correct. But I bounced back! It didn’t kill me! I didn’t ask for anyone to be fired!!!!! It’s just nice to know what the acceptable norms are, you know? Now I know what to expect.

@adam You or anyone else can find out what the FOSS world are talking about by reading the public mailing lists.

Here is someone (not me) who doesn’t want a code of conduct for example:
https://lkml.org/lkml/2013/7/17/764

Sorry for double posting, but the same excerpt is posted here – it appears the NYT edited it down a lot (I assume with Ronson’s go ahead).
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/feb/21/internet-shaming-lindsey-stone-jon-ronson

I’d just like to echo Tom Slee at #1: this is thoughtful and thought-provoking, esp. the ‘community as artifact’ approach.

Jake @ 29

I agree with the gist of your comment but re this:

“I’m not sure that Ben’s comment is sexist beyond being obnoxious — because I’ve seen this same sneering at liberal arts types when the putative liberal arts type was male as well.”

Just wanted to note that sexism (though possibly more appropriate to talk about patriarchy here) isn’t just about prejudice against women, it’s about the privileging of a specific type of masculinity (male liberal arts people would be ‘girlie men’ in this world).

One of the big reasons I have a linguistics major — to go with my comp.sci one — is ’cause I couldn’t hack it in the real humanities; systematising huge amounts of unstructured anecdotal data like historians do, or prising apart detailed understandings of people from single perspectives like literature people do, are things I’m not very good at.

But, y’know, I like purple grapes even so; I can distinguish between “things I’m not good at” and “things that aren’t important” because I’m well-adjusted enough to see where the world needs people who aren’t-like-me, am a grown-up with a grown-up sense of identity.

Sumana I could not actually fix your link properly. WordPress dislikes the blog.org domain and kept spitting out like an infant determined to refuse all nourishment. So I just stuck it up for people to copy/paste. Sorry!

Hi Sumama. Thanks for the lengthy and thoughtful response.

I appreciate what you’re saying about the ease of exit and the intangibility of mindshare; to my mind, mindshare (like socially constructed things generally) is real, a FLOSS project with a thriving ecology of contributors is far more valuable than a nearly identical chunk of code with only a couple of voices available to help out, and thus the finite amount of human attention limits our ability to make effective forks. In your North Korea analogy, I think I don’t quite agree because sure, anyone can have the juche philosophy (the source code) and try out their new spin on it, but the really scarce thing that they can’t easily duplicate is the land and the infrastructure (the community of people). I don’t want to get too inside-baseball for the rest of the commenters to follow. But I see counterexamples in the Tribble-like multiplication of JavaScript frameworks-of-the-week, at the mediocrity of most of the forks of English Wikipedia, and at how and why project leaders try to avoid divergent forks. Of course perhaps I’m not quite getting at what you are getting at. Thanks for considering this stuff!

You have a good point about mindshare. Mindshare is really valuable at a coarser grained level. For example, mindshare is an important reason why someone might choose Python over Perl. Python seems to have better community prospects going forward even if you personally think Perl is a better language*. But when it comes to divergence within communities I think mindshare is less important.

To keep with the Python example, Guido van Rossum is certainly BDFL for CPython and as such also has heavy influence on lesser used implementations. But when people wanted to use Python on the JVM, or .NET, or just experiment with different runtimes, there was no problem forking to Jython, IronPython, Stackless Python, and PyPy. If enough people decided that .NET was the way of the future, IronPython could eclipse CPython and GVR just wouldn’t be as important any more.

I have worked in a number of companies where we used a lot of FLOSS software and sometimes customized it without getting our changes incorporated back upstream. Sometimes changes were just too specific to one domain, other times it took too much effort to get changes accepted upstream. Whoever ruled the upstream, it was easy for us to go our own way.

This is different from e.g. Wikipedia, because Wikipedia is a lot more about the people, infrastructure, and domain name than about the wiki software. It’s different from W3C or IETF because standards-setting communities are by necessity seeking broad consensus. It makes a lot less sense to build a one-organization-only fork of Internet Protocol called IPv7 than it does to build a one-organization-only fork of a database storage engine.

It’s also different from the older and still-living tradition of academic software that is offered in source code form, and provided at zero monetary cost, but restrictively licensed. The Cavendish Laboratory will remain dictator for the CASINO software system whether you approve of that dictatorship or not. You need permission to redistribute the unmodified code, permission to modify it for personal use, permission to use it for commercial purposes, and permission to integrate it with other systems. It drove me crazy in graduate school and it still drives me crazy. Fortunately there is a lot more FLOSS scientific software now than 10 years ago but the abundance of “no money, just fealty” academic licensed software in scientific domains still pains me.

Compared to the straitjacket of licensing with academic software, and the straitjacket of history and compatibility concerns with protocols and projects-as-communities, I see FLOSS as offering a remarkable freedom of exit. Probably the closest organizational analog to the utopian-anarchist fantasy of Iain M. Banks’ Culture as we will ever achieve in real life. You only have to obey leaders as long as you want to. You can splinter away into a faction as small as one person and nobody can stop you. I emphasize the legal and practical freedom to fork FLOSS projects not because it is unlimited, but it is at least remarkable.

*I don’t!

It seems like there is an interesting dynamic at play, rather like one of those evolutionary game theory models with Hawks and Doves. Legally-restrictive open licences can compete with closed-source software in a way that perhaps legally permissive license’s couldn’t (or certainly didn’t).

But in a world where where propriety software is all but extinct, the legal restrictions are a pure overhead, like spikes on a dinosaur whose predators are dead. So you see corporate-backed permissive software like clang evolving faster than old-school GNU projects like gcc.

Thing is, few developers under 30 will remember working in a world where a valid business model was ‘our software is horribly buggy; if you pay us the price of a car every year, we may fix some of the ones that hurt you the most’.

So to pick up the point made above, if the wider open source movement is the Culture, GNU is Special Circumstances. And as long as Oracle still exists, perhaps it is needed.

The analogy with rules for conventions makes some sense; if you split them into Jerk-dominated, Bureaucratic and Fun, perhaps you can only get much fun after the bureaucrats have dealt with the jerks.

Of course, that is far from the only possible dynamic…

Sumana, that is a really great link. Thanks.

Ben,

Sexism aside. Because you’re damaging a cause I care about.

Is it valid to worry about management not listening? Yes. Is it valid to worry about “liberal arts types” (no code needed) not always recognizing the contributions of those who use language differently? Yes.

But being a “science type” doesn’t make you right when you make up personal definitions for words, like “code,” or when you pretend that liking to think about things rather than concepts puts you in closer touch with reality than other people, or that you don’t have to listen to the other kind of people, because they’re morally tainted, or for whatever other reason.

I liked the post a lot and enjoyed a lot of the comments, particularly as I find it interesting to listen to people who work in/know about a specific industry/area debate the internal politics of their industry. Ben, i think the problem (not piling on) is that you havent added anything of substance to that.
Back to Sumana’s post, one thing jumped out of me that could be elaborated on, ie:

“After all, a pretty widespread reading of the core function of government and law enforcement is that they keep Us Good Guys safe by stopping The Bad Guys from committing face-to-face (or knife-to-face or chair-to-face) assault. And there’s a lot of nuance we ought to talk about in discussing how to develop and enforce good online codes of conduct — for instance, what if microaggressions in online spaces are often less ephemeral and less avoidable, and thus will get reported more consistently than they do at meetups and conventions?”

I don’t know if I agree with all of this, or at this level of generalisation anyway. That is, it is *one* function of governance and policing (theoretically, and perhaps less so in practice) but another function of governance and policing *is* to institutionalise a specific set of power relations. It’s as much an attempt to institutionalise a specific set of behavioural norms as it is to protect people , and so I can understand why it might recieve some pushback and be legitimatly worth objecting to. Especially if it is seen as forced on a community rather than arrived at through deliberation and consent (whatever that might mean)
That’s a more ,general point and not really speaking to anything specific Sumana is talking about (as I dont know the details) Perhaps, Ben, and Im not being snarky or patronishing, you could add something with a little more detail and less ad hominen to explain what your problems are with the specifics of Sumana’s program ? (I personally might sympathise with bits.or maybe not)

Mimi & Eunice weigh in:

http://mimiandeunice.com/2011/04/08/you-may-be-right/

For the hard of thinking, Liberal Arts codes for “deals with words, people and organisations”. STEM codes for “deals with facts and things”.

Do people who primarily work as coders live each alone, in a savage state of nature, or do they work in organizations? When they need to communicate to one another whether they have made progress on shared goals, or even determine what those goals are, do they use words, or some sort of elaborate smoke signal routine? The latter in both cases, surely. If people who major in the Liberal Arts in college have superior facility with words, people and organizations just to the same extent that people who major in STEM have a superior facility in their own demenses, then surely we should put the former to work getting things organized and leave the latter to grind it out like gold-farmers and get the project working?

I happen to think this all sounds like total bullshit, but it appears to be the logical consequence of your view, Ben. For one thing, systems of organizations are facts, or sets of interlacing facts; people learn about them in many fields. The systematic way the vowels or laryngeals in Proto-Indo-European are expressed as vowels in differing grades of verbs in Ancient Greek is a fact (a scientific theory, but a reasonably good one). It is none the less non-STEM, and thus not about facts or things, apparently. For another, a coder who cannot deal with or use words has limited utility. Not zero utility, I’ll grant, but let’s agree a complete breakdown in communication and consistent misinterpretation about instructions due to this person’s ignorance of words would render him a failed coder. Look, it can’t possibly be your contention that “people whose STEM training has nothing to do with organizations, due to the non-factual nature of organizations; whose learning was opposed even to the mention of organizations, since organizations are not things; people to whom even the word organization is anathema–these people can organize themselves perfectly without any intervention from people who know both the subject matter at hand and how organizations work!” Yet you appear to be claiming this.

I am loath to respond to you at all because you started in with such an extraordinarily rude, dismissive comment. Yet your manifest contradictions beguile me. Dance.

I’ve mentioned it here before, I think, and it’s at least semi relevant to the conversation, but there’s a new book by Jill Leovy (Ghettoside: Investigating a Homicide Epidemic) which looks at ‘black on black’ murder in Watts (in the 00s but also looking back to the 80s and 90s) Her argument is that the cause of the murder waves wasnt ‘over-policing’ so much as ‘under-policing’ , a misuse of police resources away from solving murders to prosecuting for petty crimes , which incentivised people to take their own revenge , isolated the rest of the community and criminalised a generation of young black (primarily) men.
The specifics do matter, I think, as does the implementation, and the extent to which the new laws/procedures have support.

Anyway, here’s an interview with her (might be relevant in a roundabout way)

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/120874/ghettoside-jill-leovy-qa-author

people whose STEM training has nothing to do with organizations, due to the non-factual nature of organizations; whose learning was opposed even to the mention of organizations, since organizations are not things; people to whom even the word organization is anathema–these people can organize themselves perfectly without any intervention from people who know both the subject matter at hand and how organizations work!

You say that as a straw man, but it actually seems pretty plausible to me. Apparently, it was something like 1880 when it became a statistically good idea to go see a doctor. Any time before that the multi-thousand year tradition based on assemblies of mostly wise men and libraries of largely true facts did, on average, more harm than good.

Because all the true knowledge was hopelessly entwined with wrong ideas, scams and power plays. So overall it was more likely to kill than cure.

Suspecting that something like that is still the case in mainstream economics and management theory is surely the underlying basis for any progressive view that doesn’t amount to ‘err, try to be nice I guess?’.

When considering the project governance models in use, I think it’s import to qualify distinguish a couple of leader models. Certainly there is the “Benevolent Dictator for Life” approach used by Python and the Linux kernel, but some projects also elect their leaders.

Namely, the Debian Project does so, and has for about 15 years. Not only that, but they use Instant Round-Robin Voting, a.k.a. a Condorcet method. Debian Project Leaders (DPLs) serve for a term of one year. The Project also has a Technical Committee; these roles are defined in the Debian Constitution.

All of this information is readily publicly available, but if there’s any light I can shed on things, you can ask me, because I used to be a DPL myself (2005-2006).

Regards,
Branden

Val @ 50 — Conceded. Thanks.

Jake @ 79
And thinking about it, the most pernicious thing about that system is that (like gender itself) is a socially constructed system that young people are forced into. At school, I enjoyed both the maths side and the word side – it wasn’t till I went to university that I had to choose between them. To then try, as Ben does, to build some implicitly gendered system of superiority-inferiority on top of that forced choice really is adding insult to injury!

“Yet your manifest contradictions beguile me. Dance.”

Oh snap. My wife kinda won that one.

ZM: this is just a pure anti-management point though, and has nothing at all to do with whether your boss is good at math. My mom worked at MCI negotiating real estate rights so that they could put up cell towers and ensure coverage. Sometimes property holders had them over a barrel because there was nowhere else for miles around; at other times they had their choice of spots. She had a great team who was intensely loyal to her. Did her manager understand what the fuck her job even was about? Sort of. But did his manager understand even vaguely how to do her job, or what doing it successfully would mean? NO. Not even a little. They would issue conflicting diktats within weeks. They demanded she cut overall money paid out in her unit 10% by giving the appropriate number of workers unwarranted bad performance reviews. She took most of the pay cut herself and divided the remainder evenly among her team; the business, not understanding the source of her underlings loyalty and effectiveness, would shift them out to failing teams and then not understand why they didn’t do great there. My mom was not a math person or a law person or anything; she had been a serious, I’m living in a commune run by Dennis Hopper hippie who had to learn on the series of jobs she hustled, from paralegal up through to this serious managerial position. It’s wrong to conceptualizer this in terms of noble engineers and quants who can do math vs evil Liberal Arts-trained bosses who can’t. It’s just the normal office workers of the world vs Dilbert’s pointy-headed boss. And if anything your infuriating manager is an MBA, not an English Lit. major.

ZM @ 85

I did like physics especially when it was very maths-y, up until I was 16 and there were only two girls in the class and the (male) teacher didn’t like me – after which I stopped liking physics.

Stop me if I’ve told this one before (ha ha you can’t), but one of my daughters and I were talking about school recently and realised we had both had weirdly similar experiences when we were fourteen and earnestly went up after class to tell our (male) physics teachers that they had made a mistake, and were puzzled that they weren’t more grateful to us for pointing it out. (She continued on the maths and physics track at uni and now of course earns lots of dosh, something I’ve never quite managed!)

Anyway – sort of OT, but relevant to the reasons why more women don’t go into STEM and why the Arts vs STEM thing is an over-simplification.

One possibly helpful read is John Levi Martin – Social Structures. My take is that hierarchy is the only structure that really scales. Which, if you accept it, directs attention both to scale issues and to restraining hierarchy (nested conciliar structures seem to work best). The point on having management who understand what the business actually does is a good one – most of the train wrecks I’ve seen are MBAs and finance types thinking what they knew was all they needed to know.

Sumana, I have nothing against you really – how could I? I am sure you’re great at your job and this was really not aimed at you personally. Management is important just as is sales, and there is always a tendency for each group to think that they are the “real” company doing the “real” work, when in fact all are necessary. I think it all just got out of hand and I very much hope you are not offended.

Anyway it seems we’ve partly been talking at cross purposes. “No touching” rules at in-person technical events are a great idea. I’d hate to be one of the 5% women in a conference full of men where even a tiny proportion think groping is an OK first expression of romantic interest.

Bianca: “You’re just reinforcing the idea that engineers are some kind of primitive chaotic that has no concept of self-governance, and has to be tamed by Lawful interlopers and fifth columnists ”

That’s not a plausible objection. It wouldn’t be possible for them to do what they do if that was the case. There must be some governing principle albeit one which may not be visible to the cadastral eye.

@Belle, yes of course we can all do some of each type of skill. Writing a code of conduct is within the reach of most of us (as you said we all accept the principles). Persuading people to adopt an externally imposed one probably takes a degree in politics though.

Really it was supposed to be a throwaway comment along the lines of “here we go, the jocks are coming for the geeks’ cafeteria table”. I wasn’t expecting it to kick of all this, you know, USENET. (It’s not even my table, I’m on the next one over.)

I am glad I amuse you anyway! Maybe I will be allowed back then?

Anyway I am going way for a week now so I will be unable to respond further. Sorry.

Yes of course we can all do some of each type of skill. Writing a code of conduct is within the reach of most of us (as you said we all accept the principles).

Ben, it is evident that you cannot write a modestly civil blog comment without difficulty. Why on earth should anyone imagine you are capable of writing a code of conduct? I am very willing to accept your apology to be unable to post for some time.

Harald K., have you read the interview with Adria Richards, the woman in question, which I linked above? According to her (and I believe this is a legit timeline) she originally took the photo because the PyCon guidelines suggested identifying whoever was violating the rules of conduct, and she didn’t think they’d volunteer their names. In this case the violation (in her version) was telling a joke she found offensive at a loud volume and for several minutes, not, as in their version, whispering a joke between themselves for a moment, and she tweeted it to the con organisers and her followers. It didn’t blow up huge on twitter until one of the men wrote about it on Hacker News less than 24 hours after it was posted. That’s way sooner than the “two days later” that he claimed he lost his job in the NYT article. Richards got a heads-up from a friend that she was getting re-tweeted like mad, and then got fired herself soon after in an damage control move by her workplace. She even, unlike the two guys, had to move out of her place because she got doxxed and was getting so many death and rape threats. I have to say I don’t think she did anything totally horrible, even though everyone can agree the results were horrible for all concerned. She was thinking “oh god, more typical bullshit, why at a professional conference can I not get 30 fucking minutes without my colleagues acting like 7th graders” and the guys were thinking “dongles LOL” (fair enough! I might well have LoLed!). She notified con organisers because that was in line the actual stated written policy, and tweeted it out to her 7K followers just to say “look at this shit,” without any intention of getting anyone fired. She has no doubt regretted it a billion times, but at the time it may have been some final straw on the camel’s back of random minor indignities. A minority woman, and they are rare as hen’s teeth in Silicon Valley, does something that ends with her getting banned from the industry and leaves the guys rolling along just fine. Your interpretation of that as a pushy power play seems…off, Harald. I won’t pretend I don’t know what you’re talking about, though! Yes, people who seek better codes of conduct are looking for political power. It’s just that it’s not as an end in itself, but as a means to enact the equality we regard as just. It’s not through some quota of hate that we’d be satisfied, but rather some level of non-hate: less misogyny in online communities, to pick an example not entirely at random.

Soru

“belle, would you agree that at least that train wreck was a bad result for all concerned?”

Soru, Belle just pointed out that the consequences were both far from similar, and that the person pointing out the violation of a conference code of conduct lost her job for that.

In retrospect it sounds like reporting the guys just to the con organisers and no one else might have been fine–they would have gotten contacted as well as, eventually, probably, their bosses, and probably would have apologised to her while everyone sensibly kept their jobs? It wasn’t even a joke that was in the worst ever most horrible taste, or one no one has heard before (some variation of). But it was inappropriate and unprofessional behavior for being in the audience of a conference and violated the stated rules of conduct for the con, and so I think it merited a follow-up on her part. It shouldn’t have been a job-losing offence for anyone, neither dudes nor her.

That was cross posted with your last Belle (Im not really disagreeing with your position, I dont think, just adding my tuppences worth)

Regarding Adria Richards, I think sharing the whole thing with twitter was a bad idea but that she gets a bit of a pass because this was a very early incident in the “twitter turns groups of normal people into mobs of raving sociopaths” genre. So she had no reason to expect the massively disproportional shitstorm that resulted. The same action would indicate far worse judgement today than it did then.

Ronan(rf), I don’t actually think Ronson covered it fairly. You do have to take his overarching totally moronic quest to help us all forgive Jonah Lehrer into account when you read his article (retrospectively, I mean, because this is a huge focus of the book for which that article was the teaser). Lehrer was a plagiarist and–even more–a rank fabulist, and a brief investigation of his writing turned up so many problems that he was summarily dispatched, but that doesn’t mean a longer look wouldn’t turn up trouble with all the rest too. Will no one think of the young white guys who need a second chance at the plum, well-connected gig they got, just because they completely fucking made up shitBob Dylan was supposed to have said and then pulled and extensive “18 1/2 minutes of tape is missing” routine when asked for evidence? Wait, no. Let’s just give that job to someone else, shall we?

I think we all probably agree that internet pile-ons both seem alluring at times (I too feel outraged!) but also suck and are clearly not a good way to advance social change–or, if you are of this mind–to resist social change either. They just suck, pretty much. But I think the unpredictable scaling-up must be weird, right? Like, you might hope to piss some people off at this woman, but then the baleful fires of 4chan are unleashed, laying all before them to waste, and maybe you didn’t quite expect that? Or, you think you did your bit by reporting these guys to con organisers, and now you tweet the pic too because you’re like “this? This is my professional conference that I’m at for professionals? ffs” and then the poor bastards are losing their jobs? People do similar things very often and don’t cause nasty six-significant-digit pileups on the information superhighway, so it may be a little hard to know what’s going to happen in one’s own given case. I think we can agree it’s not the best tool for social justice in the world while (perhaps mildly paradoxically) noting that it does have the power to bring an issue vividly to the forefront of people’s consciousness. Actually, the true moral of the story is that no one should ever tweet, ever.

The totally random nature of what blows up into an internet pile-on and what doesn’t is part of what makes them so obnoxious.

Bringing this back (sort of) to the original subject of codes of conduct for conventions and suchlike, I think the details of how they are enforced will turn out to be at least as important as what the formal policies are.

Looking at web forums, inconsistent enforcement of moderation policies is a huge source of disfunction.

Belle 104 – I agree that the decision to use Lehrer’s story seems ….odd. even if he was hard done by ( which, without knowing the ins and outs, I don’t think he was) I think ‘outrage’ against public figures (or institutions) is more justifiable.
I also agree joining in the outrage is alluring at times, in fact I’m a huge hypocrite here as I’m very prone to many moments of outrage myself.
I agree that Twitter and all who use it are evil.

Are we having a Violent Agreement about Adriana? Thank you.

I think the OP is about trying to implement a Virtue, in Alasdair MacIntyre’s sense. Or an explicit framework in which such an ever-evolving standard of excellence can be exercised. Programmers doing software development perhaps have a tendency to attack these problems in a uniquely programatic way … additions or changes to the code base propagate by well-understood (if not always well-controlled) methodology, changes to the norms of any society not so much.

Other kinds of dynamic groups confront these issues about how to define and refine a shared content/organization/infrasctructure … Evangelical churches spring immediately to mind. William Timberman @61, yes!! There’s a problem as old as human society, and it looks important to make some significant progress with it soon. My take is that in a globalized/individualized world a software project or a church congregation is the right scale to be working at.

that doesn’t mean that anyone who tries to suggest ways of being friendlier, nicer and more helpful is doing so as part of some kind of culture war. Mostly they just want everyone to be happier.

That would be excellently nice, but people like me would like everyone to just stop gunning each other down in the streets. In literal as well as de-hyperbolized senses.

One question that this spurred in my mind: to what extent is the rise of contracts-based models over rules-based models part of rising equality (in some senses) and to what extent is it the rise of a shift in power from governmental to corporate institutions? Not that these are unrelated, but I see two things going on:

A strong sense (especially within the FLOSS commmunities) that contributors are equal; you’re to be judged by what you do, not your affiliation. This makes for an inherent tension with any governance structure (at least if your primary notion of government is “telling me that I can’t do things”). Equality, of course, can either be a threat to those in power or it can be defined by those in power such that they retain power.

Meanwhile, contracts have taken over as a primary way of negotiating relationships: a EULA is a replacement for a legal understanding of the relationship between two parties who are doing business. I don’t, in other words, sign a EULA when I buy a pair of socks—or even when I buy a car (Teslas excepted) because the purchase relationship is legally defined; even the followup on what can and can’t be in your warranty is legally defined. But companies would rather be bound by an agreement they write than a body of law based on either commonlaw or constitutional concepts, or legislation.

Contracts presume an equality between the parties; in theory, both sides can take a breach of contract to court. In practice, of course, a EULA is a contract that masks radical inequality in power between the parties, in this ways it seems the logical sum of these two trends. Governance requires wrestling with equality in a real way, on the other hand, and voluntarily submitting to an authority constituted in some fashion (over time, by people, etc.), as opposed to preserving a contractual illusion of equality.

It is great to hear (in these comments) about successful (and less successful) strategies.

Some formatting glitch in previous comment, should end ‘any firm sacking anyone based on matters successfully resolved at the conference will be subject to legal action for breach of contract’.

Then when someone tells a stupid joke, they get to apologize, or maybe watch a training video. Firms get a usable defense against twitter storms. And, most importantly, those enforcing the rules will be in a position to make things better, without facing suspicion they are only doing it because they found a shortcut to wielding the near-mythical power of a CEO.

On the topic of stupid jokes, there’s another one to be made here about race conditions…

If you had asked me the year before what I thought the community’s most serious issues were in expanding and increasing engagement, “casual hostility to certain demographics” wasn’t even on my radar.

Where one language is dominant I’ve seen variants of “Please forgive me! English is not my first language!” as a signature in communications. What I take for rudeness could be clumsiness, and the inner grammar/spelling Nazi must be suppressed.

A great comment, Dingbat @112. I’d like to think it illustrates my allusion upstream to H.S. Maine. But both purchases and licenses are “legally defined.” Buying property engages a regime of statutory and common law. So when you write this: “But companies would rather be bound by an agreement they write than a body of law based on either commonlaw or constitutional concepts, or legislation” — I reply, well, companies who purchase property (socks, cars, factories) sure as hell don’t want to be so bound. They want the highest ownership possible, which a licensing agreement does not provide. And then there’s Citizens United and Hobby Lobby, to name a couple high-profile SCOTUS cases, both declaring constitutional law in ways I suspect a lot of companies approve of.

Or, to say it another way, if a commercial software developer who needs to solve a problem finds a library that does it, she has to look at the license. If it’s non-restrictive (e.g. Apache), she can use it as long as she credits Apache for the help. If it’s restrictive (e.g. GPL), she can’t; she has to take the time to write original code that does the same job. This doesn’t make anyone better off; the resulting program simply became more expensive to produce. I suppose it may give Richard Stallman some consolation for the fact that no one calls it GNU/Linux.

Stephenson-quoter-kun: you are right that “what if they worked” doesn’t seem very likely. So part of your reasonable resentment is, “I don’t want to be forced to do freedom-restricting things in support of a very uncertain outcome, just because the final proposed outcome is a good one.” But I think you do right in conceding that “if they worked then do it” seems reasonable. And we know there is some value of “there are posters” that is hostile to women: notionally-clad women in porn-star poses on posters (or actually naked porn stars, providentially hidden by leaves. Or improvidently unhidden). Woman find that irritating, consistently, but also find it hard to ask anyone to take it down. This sort of thing has made it through courts as actual classic hostile workplace, so it’s not theoretical (now you may object that it was the porn stars; but I think you’ll find it was pin-ups as well; now you may object changing standards render this moot; this would require some justification but is not crazy.) Geek posters can shade over here if someone is super-into Vampirella, right? (And someone is because there are like twenty titles or something. Who buys this? There is free porn now? Wat? WAT?) What if it’s just Seven of Nine, and Six from BG? Or even Power Girl, conceivably? Sure, we’re all grown-ups who’ve seen Princess Leia in the slave costume before, but what if the dude with the slave Leia poster is a TOTAL raging dick to you all the time? What if he makes snide gross comments constantly? What if he is “surprise backrub” guy? You might start to hate the fuck out of that poster, even if you were Princess Leia four years in a row for Halloween.

The problem is this: some people conflate geekiness with masculinity. This is wrong, but it’s the battle-line all of GamerGate and its varied anti-SJW allies is drawn up to protect. “What if gaming were a space where women were around all the time and it wasn’t helpful to stop what you were doing and say bullshit sexist shit like–best case–tits or GTFO, worst case–I’m going to hack your head off and fuck your spinal column?” BZZZT. “What if women loved comic books too and..dammit I even like the artist for the new Power Girl what the fuck though?” (Yes, I fix this by reading only Adventure Time, Bravest Warriors, and manga) BZZT. This “geeks are men” thing is acutely irritating to every female geek in the world, but it’s part of the definitional identity of some men, and they really seem to get upset when women are touching their stuff. Like, how will it even hurt you if women enjoy the same interests as you? No, we have to hear shit about fake geek girls, and about how girls ignored them in high school in favor of jocks and are now only pretending to be geeks for that sweet sweet geek money, because everyone apparently went to school in a 1980s movie. It’s easy to feel negative about this…because it’s so fucking depressing…but in part it is down to female community members making themselves felt enough to receive a backlash; this is a stage beyond hiding, watchful invisibility, so, yay! But more this goes on, it may be the more neutral, geeky things will code male to non-invested viewers, which can only increase the mild alienation recorded by the study you note. In which case, if there were no posters in the HS and undergrad shared CS labs, and the percentage of women majoring started to go up instead of down (as it’s now less than it was in like 1988) then I would say that didn’t seem like a very bad trade-off? And I don’t mean to stick the GamerGaters in the middle there by sleight of hand to get my result at the end; I think it’s relevant that they are interested in making sure the things of ordinary, gender- and race- and sexual-orientation-neutral-geekdom, code straight white male.

Back in comment #17 Belle asked Sumana to help CT come up with a policy for comment threads, and when she did I thought of her comment in Eszter’s thread about how the women bloggers of CT post less often than the men partly because of the sexist pushback they often get. I’ve been thinking about this ever since.

Twice recently Belle has nuked a sexist commenter, once upthread here and once in Eszter’s thread, and I’ve noticed she is the CT blogger most likely to step in when sexist stuff is happening in another blogger’s thread. It seems the same few people deal with sexist pushback every time; some male and female commenters, and some of the women CT bloggers. I noticed and liked Henry’s comment upthread, and wonder whether more such comments from their brother bloggers would make a difference. What I mean is, since it is probably not possible to prevent sexist comments, maybe we can hope to deal with them in such a way that the burden does not fall so solidly on the women posters.

Are the male CT bloggers all aware that the women get this sexist garbage? I ask seriously, because they are all busy people who, even if they read a lot of each other’s posts, may not keep up with the comment threads. If they are aware, are they also aware that this unrelenting, unfun feedback may make the women post less often than they would otherwise?

And if they are aware of these things, do they think CT should do something about it? If yes, are they inclined to do something themselves, and if so, do they have the time to do anything more than they already do? For example, one strategy that occurred to me that might lighten the women posters’ load is if sympathetic male bloggers occasionally would each “adopt” a contentious thread to help moderate it. This would be asking a lot, I know, because this blog is done in people’s spare time, and it must be hard sometimes even to keep on top of their own threads.

I don’t know whether this idea would interest the CT owners, or even whether it would work, if implemented (that is, whether it would it make the women feel less deterred from posting again) but since Belle mentioned asking Sumana for ideas I thought it was worth throwing this idea out there. I do think commenters have a responsibility, too, but our opinions carry less weight than the opinions of the blog owners.

To conclude this awfully long comment, I’d like to say that to me CT feels friendlier to feminism, and to me as a feminist, now, than it did a couple of years ago when I first came here.

My first comments were made in the thread of a post of Belle’s that came to be known as the GRR Martin thread (a long thread that had nothing to do with the post, whose title I’ve forgotten). At that time CT did not feel like such a good place to talk about feminism, and I said so. It feels much better to me now, and I’d like to thank all the bloggers here for their work in making it so.

That said, it must be wearying in the extreme for the women to face the kind of sexist reaction they so often get. I’d love to see more posts from them so am interested in discussing possible solutions.

(Note: I’m not thinking of banning people)

Just in: NSF on the demographics of STEM…

http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/2015/nsf15317/

Henry,

I know there’s a long history here of commenters finding it difficult to find a nice way to engage guest posters, often women, but I remember the Shirky guest post, too. If Belle and Sumana are okay with the “gallantry” it’s not my place to object. But the comment in question raised a few issues and unfortunately mingled in an arguably sexist one in there. You seemed to want to cut off that line of discussion and that’s fine. If he had wanted to taint the second line of argument by association, he couldn’t have done a better job, IMHO, though of course others’ MMV. But that’s not your fault, it’s his.

Tech is a big world. I’ve heard anti liberal arts sentiment lots of times from people not given to sexist blather, and really, it is a code for anti-elitism, anti-Ivy, anti-management (which admittedly does have more women than engineering when you count HR, marketing, and so on). I don’t know the new FLOSS world, though I have (and my husband has) worked on he edges of it. I think it would be amusing to see the reaction to this thread of the commenter who’s an IT manager and doesn’t like to hire people who took software engineering courses because they’re too independent. Now there are startups where they avoid CS majors because of he “academic BS.”

I do think the OP is interesting and I’m glad people who are working in that world had a chance to discuss it.

I don’t think the disciplinary clash stuff should be written off. Liberal arts do tend towards feminism and social justice. For all the fuss over the death of liberal arts, it’s had a enormous political impact on social justice movements. What are now everyday arguments over privilege and micro-aggressions and oppression and so on have their origins in huge numbers of people being given college liberal arts educations. Whatever your stance, you’ve got to acknowledge this has shaped mass culture and is an enormous political achievement. I see this stuff day-to-day in ways that you just wouldn’t have 10-15 years ago.

Computing has other roots, tending libertarian/anarchist because of interest in stuff like cryptography and the early internet/hacking influences on pioneers. This has an impact too. Wikimedia is historically very free speech, it’s deliberately taken risky positions – it was one of the few orgs to republish the Jyllands-Posten cartoons, it hosts nudity (including child nudity) and erotic art – when it could have taken a much safer more mainstream route. So when per #53 you get a CoC couched in social justice terminology prohibiting offensive remarks relating to religion and sexual images, I don’t think you can write off a genuine culture clash.

Lynne @ 124
Just wanted to say I really support what you are saying here. I have to stop spending so much time in these kinds of internet discussions for a while, but I support you and wish you good luck with this.

Yeah, on the whole I’d say I’m also in vehement agreement with you, Stephenson-quoter-kun. I actually thought of the Maginot Line. Stop surprise backrub guy, but if they take away our Star Trek posters, some unholy alliance of r/KotakuInAction and corporate HQ has won. As to why the male geeks won’t go for the obvious interpretation of sexism–have you heard the one about white feminists and intersectionality?

I’ve heard the one about white feminists and intersectionality. Angela Harris, Stanford Law Review, 1990, and so on. Moreover, I’ve had the pleasure of discussing the topic with Angela, a teacher and friend. I believe MacKinnon/Dworkin has much to offer, despite Harris’s deserved skewering of their position. For example, geekiness is not, as far as I can tell, even remotely among the characteristics that might intersect with race and sex to serve white males as a wedge to divide and conquer. The “kind of shit” women get, speaking generally, is nothing of the sort that geeks get or got for a handful of decades at most. Maybe there’s a rhetorical advantage to making the comparison, true (i.e., to “sell” feminism), but it seems to me Larry Summers is a good example of ordinary skepticism gone haywire bad.

Dean C. Rowan: Stephenson-quoter-kun was suggesting a way that male geeks’ own sense of being beleaguered and despised could be used to explain feminism to them, via analogy. It’s not actually the case that geeks are a class of people similar to an ethnic minority. I’m jealous that you’re friends with Harris and don’t think Summers is an example of good turned anything. He’s asshole turned flaming asshole.

Val, this is true of the shows but not completely. And the question is more about ST fandom. Is it overwhelmingly male with only a few token females? Not so much. It was/is a popular series of TV shows/movies in a way that doesn’t map onto the proportional character divide on-screen. Lt. Uhura meant a lot more to black girls watching TV in the 1960s than her apparent job as mini-skirted space receptionist would seem to indicate.

My concluding sentence, the one about that blustering asshole Summers, never suggested he exhibited anything good. I gave what I thought was a *good example* of what Summers himself tried to characterize as ordinary skepticism among collegial friends, harumph, harumph, as the basis for his utterly stupid remark. My point, not well expressed, being that Stephenson-quoter kun’s strategic advice fell short.

Thank you, William Berry, for the corroboration. I mean, I did not want to suggest that because *I* was so well aware of feminist theories and demands at some relatively early age that everybody else ought to be so enlightened. It just seems to me that feminism offers, for better or worse, well recognized points of view that course across our radar pretty frequently.

None of this detracts, for me, from S-Q K’s mostly helpful account. It’s the sort of stuff that really advances mutual understanding.

And, yeah, I didn’t mean to harsh on SQK.

It’s just that this nerd anti-feminism crapola really gives me the fantods.

I agree with Lynn and Val the female posters and sometimes commenters are criticized much more and in different ways.

I don’t know what the solution is . I suggested volunteer mods, but I would not like to be a volunteer mod so I am not sure any other commenters would. Maybe some way of flagging inappropriate comments? I was arguing too much about the wrongs of colonialism and historical responsibility and the conquest of Wales and London’s ecological footprint in Henry’s St Patrick’s Day thread to participate in Corey’s Israel thread – but I was following the discussion and a commenter there said women were like Israel , linked to an article about Silvia Plath and Assia Wevill’s suicides – and then said trying to reverse engineer Ted Hughe’s poem Thought Fox was a good idea – I thought that was very creepy and wished someone had flagged and moderated it.

Dean C. Rowan; William Berry: Oh, I see I missed the section of Stephenson-quoter-kun’s comment in which he described computer programmers learning about feminism for the first time five years ago on reddit. That’s just…weird and wrong. Not that Stephenson-quoter-kun is weird and wrong qua person; but that’s a very odd way to describe the relation between the concept of feminism and the group of people who work in Silicon Valley (or not, Stephenson-quoter-kun himself lives in the UK or something IIRC despite being from the States originally.) I mean…my HS best friend was crazy rich, and she had an Apple IIe (her dad also bought 30 for the CS lab of our girls’ school.) I have greatly amused my children by telling them of the amazing program Sacha and I wrote one day after school that showed a rotating cube in HIGH-DEFINITION graphics (i.e. green lines on a black screen…there was also color for the screens, but only in huge-ass pixels.) We used BASIC to write a program that flashed six successive images–created by describing the lines with algebra in essence, I think? The result was…wait for it…a rotating cube! It was that awesome. I played D&D. I wrote Elfquest fan fiction (that’s right, I just admitted that.) I also knew about feminism already because duh. Women and men I knew who worked in start-ups in Silicon Valley in the 90s…also knew about feminism. It’s not like it’s found only in the Necronomicon of the Mad Arab or something. I don’t know who these losers are who got surprised by it in 2008 or something (SQK you are not on my loser list; I will grant you a single indulgence based on…eccentricity…or something.)

ZM: I am planning on posting on the topic but it’s a little intractable.

Maybe “modern feminism” refers by definition to post-2000 feminism or some arbitrary recent cut-off, but my experience with modern feminism–I’m on the waning end of 55 years old–is a lot deeper than five or fifteen years, and I’m a little amazed that feminism, unlike, say, democracy, could be a sort of recurring episode, past episodes of which are simply forgotten.

Not post-2000. Post 2005, maybe even post-2010.

Feminism is at least three interlinked things — a body of political theory/sociology an organized political program, and a community of activists. The first two are of course centuries old at this point. But the last changes over time, and people don’t usually interact with political theory, or even (most of the time) with political programs. They interact with other people.

And young feminists do things in ways genuinely quite different from older ones! Partly this is just the social cues for presenting as a feminist (like any other community membership marker) changing over time. But it’s also because social media like Facebook, Tumblr and Twitter have changed how they organize and communicate. (Yes, I know, your anti-Internet-triumphalism reflexes are triggering. Try talking to some younger feminists and learning (a) how incredibly valuable Twitter is to them, and (b) why that’s exactly what makes being hounded off it by misogynistic jackasses so threatening.)

The same thing is true in FLOSS culture — look at Github and see the pervasive absence of license files in the projects there. This would have been considered unthinkable laxity a decade ago, but nowadays harping on licenses marks you as someone who doesn’t “get it”. (I do in fact think this is dangerous, but obviously that also means I’m someone who doesn’t get it.)

TL;DR: The present is a different country, and you and I are immigrants.

I’m a liberal arts type, whatevs, who also for a decade ran a system running Dick Pick’s database. My mentor was a woman who knew her shit.

Pick! My first programming job was on a system that used Pick. I had no mentors, had to figure it all out for myself…long story, as usual.

Wow, memories.

/back to topic

I really don’t have a good sense for whether people think the problem is worse in FLOSS than in commercial dot-coms, and that’s why it’s a good idea to focus on that, or whether people think FLOSS is better than commercial dot-coms and can be a leader in treating women well, or whether FLOSS has a lot more people with time to devote to research like the OP (which is also fine), but the problem is with the way CS majors are educated–a lot of the talk here seems to assume the first.

I also don’t have a good sense for how many people are working in FLOSS, and how many are doing that primarily with no tie to a brick-and-mortar institution where they work or volunteer primarily as programmers (that is, excluding people at places like Intel or EMC who make sure gcc and Linux work with their stuff).

It did occur to me while typing this that Big and Medium-Size Corp may have the ability and the commitment to skim off a lot of the women CS graduates nationally, leaving even fewer for the more rough-and-tumble parts of the industry. (I know the CT commentariat hates the corporate world along with its drones, but there are organizational advantages that apparently can’t be duplicated by more informal hierarchies–one of these is the ability to override cultural default settings like “tech=straightwhitemale”.)

Other than that, I feel like it’s complicated. RMS has done a lot of good stuff, but his ideas aren’t suited to the kind of API where people really don’t–no, really, they don’t–want to bother about the source code, and if they did, they’d write it themselves. And no, nothing else right now is very good for that either, except when it’s kept very simple or else allowed to evolve for a couple of decades. (Where are our software IC’s?!) But he has a habit of standing on principle in a way that forces others to find other solutions. Parts of the FLOSS world may make similar mistakes. Or they may come up with something that’s so important to everyone that everyone overlooks how buggy a solution it is, and make themselves indispensable.

I am currently working for one of those San Francisco DotCom companies and in the engineering groups women are definitely still under-represented. My own group has only woman out of 4 members, and some teams are all-male. I wouldn’t say it is overly white though. Nearly half of the engineers are foreign-born or had foreign-born parents.

My previous employer, $BIG_CONSUMER_PRODUCTS_COMPANY, was much more even with women and men. 2 out of my 3 managers and nearly half of my in-the-trenches coworkers were women. Of course that last company also made life precarious. Almost everyone doing software development/IT, even people who had been working there several years, was treated as a contract worker. The pay was nothing special, especially after you’ve paid the extra FICA tax, and there were no benefits, no guarantees of getting enough hours next week. That’s why I left, after promises of a better tomorrow had been dangled in front of me and kept failing to materialize.

Come to think of it, the first job I got offered out of college was with $GIANT_DEFENSE_CONTRACTOR and during the interviews at least they seemed to have a fairly even split of women and men. Instead I took an offer from a startup, which eventually failed, and worked through a string of other didn’t-quite-make-it startups since. All of the startups have been skewed heavily male.

That is to say, my anecdata supports bianca steele’s guess that big corporations might hire more women CS graduates, leaving the FLOSS world and its symbionts in startups more male-skewed. Of course both of my big company examples involved businesses that needed software but didn’t make money primarily from software or electronic services. What would be interesting is comparing older software successes like Adobe with got-big-recently companies like Facebook. Was Facebook as heavily male as other startups, back when Myspace was the social network to beat? Now that it’s big and profitable, is it hiring more women?

Marshall:

The Temporary Name: These will always bring conflict and tribalism in their wake

Stephenson-quoter kun wrote those words.

Matt–

How are the women at those dot-coms treated? Back almost thirty years ago, at Mid-Size Corp, in my department there were only two culture/harassment issues that I knew about: one was a group with two 20-something single men and two 30- or 40-something married men, and as far as anyone could tell the older men were driving it, probably trying to be “cool” like the kids, and the one woman who ignored the danger signals and joined their group ended up complaining of harassment. Another was a facilities manager who had a picture of a lady sitting spread eagled on the hood of a car, right above the chair where you had to sit when you asked him for new furniture for your group or something. And there was a cult of a certain personality, but there were enough basically normal people around that guy (who let him do what he wanted in part because he fit a “type” and in part because they were afraid of him, not an older guy either, but someone a bit younger than most of the others) that they buffered it all a bit. At (hardware) startups there was more time pressure and work expansion, and where the men were older there was less consideration for what it was like to have to pick up your own dry cleaning, but also less time for BS. But it sounds like things are a lot worse now and in different kinds of workplaces. I personally prefer working for hardware companies than places that just do software; I think management gets kept down to earth a little by having less fudgeable requirements on what they’re doing. I don’t know about Facebook at first; “The Social Network” shows pretty much all the coders being men, but Sorkin may have had his reasons for doing that.

OTOH: A good number of women hired around the time I was, though, left development VERY quickly for related fields like marketing or support, it seemed for reasons related to culture, but more like they wanted to talk to people more than they did (this was before texts and really before email was ubiquitous, so I guess it could seem very isolating). I have wondered whether foreign-born women don’t get the same signals telling them they don’t belong in development (though it could also be that Chinese universities, say, encourage women to do really technical stuff where US universities don’t, I don’t know).

The contractor thing is a mess, too. I knew a guy who worked summers as a developer and winters as a ski instructor. It was very appealing. Farming out all the code to contract shops and keeping all the IP and management and architects in-house seems . . . not good.

TN @156: right you are, sorry for my sloppy editing.

And finally- re ‘being a nerd is now okay’- it isn’t okay. Or rather it’s like being obese- noone should get their ass kicked because of it, but that doesn’t mean it’s a healthy lifestyle choice. And it seems there is something a bit messed up about a society where greaseball burgers, french fries and sugared water dominate the menus at so many restaurants and that produces large numbers of people who compulsively over-eat such food rather than having more balanced, adult and enjoyable dietary preferences.

engels–

And finally- re ‘being a nerd is now okay’- it isn’t okay. Or rather it’s like being obese- noone should get their ass kicked because of it, but that doesn’t mean it’s a healthy lifestyle choice.

One of the trollier trolls said pretty much the same thing here not long ago and rightly got taken down for it. I guess you’re a regular and everyone knows you don’t mean it.

And it seems there is something a bit messed up about a society where greaseball burgers, french fries and sugared water dominate the menus at so many restaurants and that produces large numbers of people who compulsively over-eat such food rather than having more balanced, adult and enjoyable dietary preferences.

Not to mention that I have no idea what you mean by this. What’s the burger here? Star Trek instead of Breaking Bad, or instead of James Joyce? Classical music instead of pop? Science fiction instead of Time magazine? The Economist and Scientific American instead of Dennis Lehane and Elmore Leonard? And why is it bad?

I don’t really want or need answers, but that’s just silly and pointless.

bianca steele: it was my impression from the discussion above that big companies were paradoxically and depressingly often better on this front than open-source communities with no…dedicated resources for the problem, maybe?

Paul Davis: I agree it could have been more productive, and I’m sorry if I dealt with it worse than I could have, but we don’t just disappear people’s comments for being sexist, generally. We tell them they are assholes. Many people working in the field and commenting here did seem to think the issues were related insofar as the codes of conduct governing both in-person interaction and rules for communication get more contentious precisely insofar as they delve into issues such as “don’t say or do sexist, racist, homophobic things, etc.” I think we should also consider that a thread this long full of informed comments about Sumana’s point was always unlikely, because we don’t have enough well-informed commenters to make it this far (I count myself among the insufficiently informed.) Everyone is kibitzing in this thread because there haven’t been enough new posts upstream.

Suppose someone says something that offends me, and I decide to build a bonfire of his business cards on his porch, but lose control of the fire and burn down his house. Then someone says I must feel really bad about burning down his house, and I respond thusly:

“Not too bad. I do have empathy for him, but it is limited.”

In answer to a question suggesting that I must feel significant remorse, I have rejected the suggestion and emphasized how little remorse I feel. Let’s be clear about this – what I have just said is: “Oh, his house burned down? Fine.” Formally speaking, the statement is more hedged than that, but there is no plausible thought process containing genuine remorse that produces a response like that to a prompt specifically seeking remorse. What we would expect from someone who actually did not intend and would not have intended such an outcome is something like:

“OH MY GOD! I never meant to burn down his house! I was just trying to make a statement, not cause serious harm! What a terrible thing to happen to him! I apologize deeply and hope he can find it in his heart to forgive me”.

The first response, of course, is part of what Adria said. Even if she did not set out to cost Hank his job, she did not really regret that outcome either.

Now, it is true that, when she responded directly but publicly to Hank, she said that she did not agree with the firing. Let’s look at the context: Hank had just announced that he was a father of three and had gotten fired because of Adria’s actions. Instead of blaming her for this, he apologized profusely for the offense his remarks gave her. Since Adria is evidently not a complete idiot, she did not choose that moment to point out how limited her sympathy for white guys was and how she didn’t actually feel so bad about him losing his job. I think this indicates why she was so upset (as shown on Shakesville) with Jon Ronson for pretending to be more sympathetic than he actually was. It’s a common reporter’s device to get people to speak with more candor than prudence, and it evidently worked. It may feel like betrayal – I know it does because I have had reporters run this game on me – but the reporter’s job is to get the truth, and candid speech expresses more truth than guarded speech does.

Furthermore, even though people here have said that she did not understand the potential consequences of airing this publicly on Twitter, she herself says that she did:

“I’ve seen things where people are like, ‘Adria didn’t know what she was doing by tweeting it.’ Yes, I did.”

Although Adria attacks Jon for not telling the story the way she would like, she does not dispute the veracity of his quotes.

I don’t see a lot of moral distance between intending a bad consequence to your actions and accepting it after it occurs. Arguably, the latter is worse, because you can intend a bad consequence without thinking through the implications and regret it later. If you don’t regret it later, you really mean it.

Then there is Adria’s account of why she reacted the way she did:

““Have you ever had an altercation at school and you could feel the hairs rise up on your back?” she asked me.
“You felt fear?” I asked.
“Danger,” she said. “Clearly my body was telling me, ‘You are unsafe.’”
Which was why, she said, even though she’d never before complained about sexual harassment, she “slowly stood up, rotated from my hips, and took three photos”. She tweeted one, “with a very brief summary of what they said. Then I sent another tweet describing my location. Right? And then the third tweet was the [conference’s] code of conduct.”
“You talked about danger,” I said. “What were you imagining might…?”
“Have you ever heard that thing, men are afraid that women will laugh at them and women are afraid that men will kill them?” she replied. “So. Yeah.”
I told Adria that people might consider that an overblown thing to say. She had, after all, been at a tech conference with 2,000 bystanders.
“Sure,” she replied. “And those people would probably be white and they would probably be male.”
”
She has just said that she seriously feared being murdered in front of 2000 people by a man who had taken the extremely-threatening action of telling a couple of lewd jokes to a friend where she could overhear them. Maybe she didn’t actually mean killed. Maybe she meant raped or assaulted. But any such fear on such a basis and in such a situation is stark raving mad. And she has just suggested that all those bystanders (and implicitly, conference security) would sit back and do nothing in this case, because they were (mostly) white males.

If she actually believed this, or even if she felt it without believing it intellectually, the woman needs professional help. She is seriously paranoid. If not, her credibility should be discounted accordingly, since that is what she said. I don’t see anyway to defend both her rationality and her veracity in light of that statement.

Interestingly, in her initial blog post, she said something entirely different. There, her decision to make an issue of it was triggered by a picture of a little girl from a coder’s conference that was shown on stage. Here’s what she said:

“I realized I had to do something or she would never have the chance to learn and love programming because the ass clowns behind me would make it impossible for her to do so.”

Yes, if Hank got away with making a dongle joke, it would stop that little girl from ever becoming a programmer. Maybe she realized later how stupid that sounded and decided to go with the mortal terror account.

Which brings me to her own account on the Shakesville blog. She emphasizes that she did not blog about Hank’s comments till after he was fired, implying that she was not the cause of it, but this is disingenuous. It was her tweet to her 10,000 followers, not her blog post, that set off the storm. She also says that Hank’s employer had other reasons for firing him as well. How does she know this? Has the employer made any such statement? Hank’s ease at finding other employment suggests he did not leave with a bad reference. She should either retract or substantiate this statement.

She also emphasizes that she had never made a sexual harassment complaint before, implying that this event is not part of some pattern of overreaction on her part. Amanda Blum’s blog is informative on this point. According to Blum, Richards had been scheduled to give a technical talk at a conference. One of the other talks had a title that used the phrase “money shot” and suggested tongue-in-cheek that screencasters could benefit from thinking like porn directors, by which was meant keeping the focus on what the audience actually wanted to see. Adria found this offensive, but instead of objecting to the organizers, announced publicly that she was considering boycotting the conference over this. As it happens, she did not boycott, but turned her own talk into a tirade about how porn has no place at a tech conference. She also made a public issue over a T-shirt based on an XKCD comic that she seems to have clearly misinterpreted. So, while Adria may not have specifically made complaints about sexual harassment before, she does have a history of trying to make major public issues of minor matters without making any effort to resolve the issue with the other parties first.

Several people here generally sympathetic to Adria have said that Hank should not have been fired. One even cast Hank’s employer as the first (chronologically) villain in the piece. Why was Hank fired? He was fired as part of his company’s efforts to sanction sexist behavior from its employees. Specifically, he violated a code of conduct along the lines of what is advocated here (Arguably, Adria violated it too, as it prohibited harassing photos). If you believe he should not have been fired, does that not mean that company efforts to suppress sexism went too far in this case, and should that not be a relevant fact in evaluating attempts to increase such efforts? Is it likely that suppression of sexism went too far in this and only this case, and is very unlikely to go too far again, at least under existing norms? I realize that some of the discussion of CoCs and such acknowledge the possibility of them going too far, but, if you think Hank was wrongly fired over his lewd comments, then you have at least one example of a company going too far already. It is not purely hypothetical. Or is it perhaps that the company was too sensitive to the political pressure that Adria stirred up on Twitter? Should companies be less sensitive to such pressure? I don’t think so, but if you believe Hank should not have been fired, you should think about what has to be different so that such unjust firings do not happen again.

As for all the abuse and harassment Adria has received since, and the impact it has had on her life, no, that is completely undeserved and reprehensible. She certainly should not have been doxx’d; in fact, that probably needs to be made illegal. Rape threats, death threats – that’s psycho talk. And almost always just talk, but one can never be certain. And all of this should have been finished long ago. People still actively harassing her are demented. She has certainly suffered more than enough. I do find it easy to understand why she is still unemployed, however. Hank’s lewd humor says nothing about his coding ability, but her job was largely public relations, and she created a public relations disaster for her company for no good reason. She has a history of similar behavior, just nothing that reached this level of consequence before. She has stated that she doesn’t feel too bad about costing people their jobs if they are white or male, because she is black, female, and Jewish (is her sympathy also limited for gentiles?). That is, she feels justified in treating people differently, taking less sympathetic attitudes towards them, and even causing them harm on the basis of their race and gender. She believes 2000 people would sit back and watch her get assaulted or worse in a public place, if said people were mostly white males. She starts fights and immediately makes them as public as possible. This is a person likely to create conflict and bad feelings in any workplace. I wouldn’t hire her.

Nerd =def (some possibilities)

1 lower-middle-class man who was bullied at school for being timid, boring, obedient to teachers and spending too much time on school work, but then found that in the C21st American workplace precisely these traits put him in a position of power over his erstwhile oppressors (male and female)

2 someone who works for a computer company, watches Star Trek, read science fiction books and plays World of Warcraft

3 someone who is good at solving technical problems but bad at empathy and communication, and uninterested in people, culture and the wider world, especially the poltical world

It doesn’t make the term meaningless, it means that American capitalism is turning more and more people into nerds.

Pete @169:

good effort to get back on topic. Probably going to fail, but good effort.

As it turns out, I’m one of the few people who manages to actually make a living writing open source software without being employed by a company with other (larger) goals. I’ve managed to find a way to get users to pay enough for software they can also get for free to sort-of support myself and my family. But I am the exception that proves the rule, and I also work on a project which fits into the oddest, hardest subset of FLOSS to make happen: large, complex, never finished (i.e. requirements will evolve continuously over time), niche user base.

That said, this paragraph strikes me as fairly accurate:

So you get an almost feudal situation where the lead developer sits at the top doling out benefits to people with their labour, attracting the personal loyalty of a close few and the internet adulation of many. In that context, personal criticism of the leader gets seen as lese-majesty, and also a risk: if they give up and go away, everyone believes that fortune will cease to smile, the rains will not come and the software will be barren.

We’ve worked a bit with my project to try to make sure that the latter can’t happen. Even though there’s no disputing my status as BDFL, we’ve tried to ensure that all aspects of the project’s development are documented and known to others. I think the situation is comparable to that of the Linux kernel, where Linus’ departure would certainly impact the ongoing development, but it would not stop. And it is not so different to the situation in many smaller (proprietary) software engineering situations that have a founding programmer (or two). In my world, examples of that would be Steinberg or Ableton (both makers of proprietary audio software), both founded by a couple of individuals whose continued presence or departure is significant but not life threatening for the company at this point. Most larger FLOSS projects now have this property also. To be honest, the biggest problem with my sudden departure (say, due to an accident) would be taking control of hosting services for the project.

I posit that for a significant fraction of contributors – not many and certainly not all, but enough to notice – getting to shout at noobs on the mailing list is an important part of the reward package.

We’re a midsize project in terms of contributors – the current count is in the 70-80 range over a 15 year period – but I am extremely confident when I say that I don’t believe that a single developer or translator or writer or designer involved in the project ever had this motivation. The only time I ever see such behaviour (and it is rare, perhaps because I police our IRC channels and our web forums with an iron fist) is from not-absolutely-new users toward absolutely-new users.

Big companies also tend to be afraid of employment law, partly because they have the money to pay settlements. If one of Paul’s contributors persistently harassed another and Paul didn’t see the problem, what recourse does the harrassee have?

Jake @176: that’s a great question, but I think the answer is pretty simple.

Since my contributors generally don’t get any kind of compensation for their efforts, they would just cease to participate in the project, at no legally significant loss to themselves. The difference is enormous: in one case, someone’s livelihood has become coupled with harrassment, in another their voluntary participation in a part-time non-renumerative activity has led to harrassment.

A non-software analogy might be to consider what would happen if you joined some sort of free membership activity-centered club and there was a total jerk of a member who kept harrassing you. Clearly, this is where a CoC could be of use, because you’d hope to expel the jerk rather than the non-jerk.

The dilemma for a mid-size project like mine is that the overhead of developing and maintaining a CoC seems like just another thing to do amidst a list of things that is already way too long, and one that addresses a problem that we just don’t have (yet). We may lose developers because we use C++ or because we use the wrong separation model between the GUI and the backend, but so far (I believe) never because of harassment or obnoxious behaviour.

(I’d also note that if the harassment had been sufficiently venomous, there are perhaps other (civil) laws that a person could use, which be unrelated to the project (i.e. the same sorts of things one might do to respond to death threats). )

If you’ll pardon my saying so, Paul, I think your organisation will have to be quite small indeed before you can easily or confidently say no one has been slowly driven away by persistent unfair slights, or constant questioning of someone’s capacity, or the informal existence of an inner circle giving rise naturally to the position of gatekeeper(s) to the inner circle, positions which are then exploited because–well, people are sort of bastards when you get down to it. Often, at one point in a project’s life, there is a serene conviction that all the different people in the group are getting along perfectly as they willingly, voluntarily contribute their labour to a project (such as wikipedia). It’s like a lovely reflective pool in a glade. This happy picture is smashed when it turns out the smooth surface of the pool was caused by homogeneity, not frictionless cooperation. There are either small things at the bottom of the pool trying to get up and angry at being stood on, or small creatures standing in the shadows at the side, in the grass, who would like to get in but hello, the ph balance of the pool is rendering it mildly poisonous, could we work on that? and then everyone else who says, “why are you fucking up our beautiful pool?” I very much hope your organisation is a happy one in which no one is driven away from volunteer work she or he loves by the bad behavior of others, but I think you’d agree you are unusually lucky/small if that’s so.

As mentioned above, we have a total contributor size of about 70-80 people spread over the course of 15+ years. I don’t know if that counts as “quite small” or “quite large”. At any given point in time, there are probably 3-5 active developers, a dozen or so active testers/feature designers, and ZERO documentation people.

The main topic that comes up within our community that leads to exclusion arises when people show up who want to redesign the (appearance of the) application. I have definitely caused exclusion of potential contributors when this happens. But as to the gender, sexual, political, religious or racial proclivities of those excluded? I have no idea – they are just faceless nicks/handles on an IRC channel. Why does the exclusion happen? Because they want us to use technology that we don’t use (for now) to do something that we don’t believe benefits our actual users (much) but is simply to satisfy their own aesthetic judgement.

Over the years, there have been some other examples of exclusion that I can recall. There have been a couple of people who wanted the focus of the project to change (away from studio and live audio recording towards broadcast needs) – wasn’t what I was interested in, and at that time it was even more “my” project than it is now. There have been people who felt very strongly that we needed to use different coding methodologies – not something I or other then-current developers considered as a productive use of our already over-stretched hours, and in some cases involved methodologies that I/we felt were actually wrong.

A project like Ardour always has a choice at any point in time to put resources into improving fundamental design and methodology mistakes I/we made early on or to put resources into bug fixes and adding new functionality and improving usability within the context of what is already there. In general, because we have thousands of users and because we know about “second system syndrome”, we lean strongly toward the second choice, while occasionally choosing the first. The surest way to antagonize me and most other developers on the project is to show up on our IRC channel and insist that we should make the first choice way more often, with complete disregard for whatever impact this has on bug fixing and feature development.

Of course, one of the best ways to ingratiate one’s self is to do the opposite: show up on IRC and mention that you’ve spent a couple of months on a fundamental redesign of some basic stuff that we already acknowledged was wrong, show us the code, and for it to be nice :)

We are such a small community at any given point in time – the number of people who even imagine they are able to work on an application like this is really tiny, and they’re mostly right – that although I think your point about serenity-through-homogeneity is a serious one and worth paying attention to, for this particular project I don’t think we’re really afflicted by the sorts of issues that tend to affect, say, the linux kernel or Mozilla or Wikipedia.

And yes, I’m absolutely unusually lucky to have been the beneficiary of so many amazingly skilled but also awesomely generous developers, translators, testers and designers that have all contributed to the project, and I try to make sure that everyone knows that.

engels @170:

Assuming that “nerd” fits one of these definitions, or some combination of them, I don’t see why being a nerd is “not okay” or something no one should do. I mean, do I want everyone to watch Godard and Ozu films, read Lydia Davis and Bolaño, and have more than a passing familiarity with the 18th Brumaire? Of course I do! But that’s not really an option. The contrast class to “nerd” is something more mainstream, which is defined by Mitch Albom and Ron Howard or some shit. Being a nerd hardly seems like the worse choice under the circumstances.

[Nerd’s] just not a bad word when I hear it

Totally agreed.

I think there’s some unfortunate merging of the semantics of “geek” and “nerd”, something that has been happening in the broader culture for a while. For some people, the two terms are almost interchangeable, and for others they describe entirely different kinds of personality traits. “Geek” at this point is a mostly honorable term; “Nerd” is still subject to matters of interpretation.

This is like playing Warhammer with my baby brother:

Your baby brother kicks ass. Your very first link:

Nerd (adjective: nerdy) is a descriptive term, often used pejoratively, indicating that a person is overly intellectual, obsessive, or socially impaired. They may spend inordinate amounts of time on unpopular, obscure, or non-mainstream activities, which are generally either highly technical or relating to topics of fiction or fantasy, to the exclusion of more mainstream activities.[1][2][3] Additionally, many nerds are described as being shy, quirky, and unattractive,[4] and may have difficulty participating in, or even following, sports. Though originally derogatory, “Nerd” is a stereotypical term, but as with other pejoratives, it has been reclaimed and redefined by some as a term of pride and group identity.

Second link, def 2:

: a person who is very interested in technical subjects, computers, etc.

Etc.

I think Paul at 188 is right though.

AcademicLurker, we don’t have to inpute motives to Adria Richards on this. She told us quite clearly why she had the attitude she did. I left it out of my hypothetical for simplicity, but here is Adria’s full statement in response to the suggestion that she must have felt really bad about getting Hank fired:

“Not too bad,” she said. She thought more and shook her head decisively. “He’s a white male. I’m a black Jewish female. He was saying things that could be inferred as offensive to me, sitting in front of him. I do have empathy for him, but it only goes so far. If he had Down’s syndrome and he accidently pushed someone off a subway, that would be different… I’ve seen things where people are like, ‘Adria didn’t know what she was doing by tweeting it.’ Yes, I did.”

I actually think the full quote is much more damaging that what I used. The basic issue for Adria is race and gender difference. Not what Hank did, but what he is. She won’t even go so far as to say she was actually offended by the jokes(she tells dick jokes too, after all) – only that some hypothetical person could infer an offense. She compared this hypothetical inference of offense to pushing someone off a subway. Which I guess is consistent with her saying the remark caused her to fear for her life. Offense, at least, would have been within the normal spectrum of responses to an overheard lewd joke.

ZM, I don’t think you understood the purpose of my analogy and will probably be relieved to know that business card bonfires are not a hobby of mine. The cardfire is an analogy to Adria’s tweet – something that started small but became bigger and more destructive than intended. I’m not endorsing Adria’s act – I think that’s pretty clear – but at that moment I was making another point.

Belle, the pattern in her behavior is immediately making a public issue in a confrontational manner of something she objects to without giving other parties a chance to work out her objections with her first. This, I think, is rather akin to the controversial tweet, although it was not a harassment complaint per se. She made no effort to contact either the person giving the money shot talk, nor the conference organizers. Which means, if she misunderstood the talk, it is her own fault. First thing she did was accuse the conference of promoting porn and talk publicly of a boycott in her podcast and blog. And then, instead of giving the technical talk her audience came and perhaps paid for, she went on a tirade. I think that shows fundamental disrespect for the conference organizers and for the people who sought to learn from her.

So in saying the company should have ridden it out you’re saying they should have been less responsive to these particular complaints about sexism? After all, if the company is seriously trying to stamp out sexism, they are not going to limit their actions to situations they cannot “ride out”. Are you saying they should? I think you’re asking the company to have made a moral judgment that the feminists were wrong in this case. This is in tension with the idea that companies should be more responsive to the complaints of feminists. If you think companies should be responsive to womans complaints on these matters, then the first villain would have to be the women (presumably mostly women) who complained, starting with Adria who, again, has stated that she understood perfectly well what she was doing. I also don’t think you can really expect a corporation to make a moral judgment – they are not moral entities. Admittedly, that’s a bit of an oversimplification, since decisions in companies are ultimately made by people, but the logic of the corporate structure itself is amoral, and people within it are swimming upstream if they want to introduce morality, even if they are the people in charge. Dealing with corporations is a matter of what behaviors you will encourage and discourage.

And I don’t think you can make symmetrical comparisons of the fates of Hank and Adria because Hank did not attack Adria, said she was right in every thing she did, and apologized deeply for the offense he caused (or could have hypothetically enabled someone to infer).The only thing he did that contributed to Adria’s firing was simply state that the was a father of three and had just gotten fired. I cannot see why he should not have the right to say this.

Adria, on the other hand, set out to cause problems for Hank, has stated that she understood how serious those problems could get, and has made clear that she blames Hank for everything that has happened to her. She even started suggesting that maybe Hank was orchestrating the 4chan mobs and such, till Ronson talked her off that ledge. So Adria has suffered much more than Hank, but Hank has behaved much better than Adria.

As for whether Adria understood what a ruckus she could create on Twitter, she herself explicitly rejects your position and insists that she did (quoted above, and earlier too). She said she knew what she was doing *after* all the bad consequences came out, so she is asserting that she saw the possibility of something like what happened. Otherwise, she could not claim, speaking after the fact, to have understood the potential consequences of what she was doing. Who am I to suppose has better understanding of the contents of Adria Richards’ brain, Belle Waring or Adria Richards?

Belle, you want a constructive suggestion? OK. How about ;this?: Publicizing violations of the code of conduct without the prior agreement of the COC Committee (or whatever) is itself a violation of the code of conduct. If you want keep mobs from 4chan or anywhere else from getting involved, the only way to do it is keep it off the Internet. After all, what Adria did was stir up a feminist mob to create trouble for Hank. After he was fired, 4chan responded and escalated with a much nastier mob that occasionally went beyond simple speech acts to doxxing and DDOS attacks. But you can’t gatekeep mobs. Invite one, and you have invited all.

Now, some may object that this could enable the COCC to become lax by removing the element of immediate public pressure. If this is a problem, I suggest this: People can go public with the meta-issue of whether the COCC is doing its job properly. To make the case, they will have to cite specifics, but this will be done in an anonymized manner. The goal is to pressure whoever is ultimately in charge, and those people will be able to get more detail as needed. The COCC itself will also have the right to publicize cases in an anonymized manner to defend itself. There is the problem of leaks. There are a zillion ways to get things on the Internet, not all easily traceable (though untraceable sources are unverified sources). But usually you can tell from which side a leak came, even if you cannot prove it.. If the norm is established that this is not OK, it will often backfire.

engels @187:

I don’t even understand the argument here. It sounds like you’re saying that because “nerd” is—perhaps more accurately, was*—a pejorative, being a nerd is a bad way of being. That’s an unconvincing argument, obviously, and I’m guessing you have some other argument in mind—except that it’s impossible to tell what it is.

Meanwhile, I’m with bianca steele @189: “geek” still suggests semi-weirdo to me (tho possibly in a lovable way!), whereas “nerd” is how humanities PhDs self-describe, in my experience.

*Maybe this is a case where US usage has diverged from British usage; I wouldn’t know.

“nerd” is how humanities PhDs self-describe, in my experience

This is precisely the kind of thing I object to. The ascendancy of nerd values in 21st century America has become such that even forces of resistance must publicly adopt the mantle of the nerd to maintain their legitimacy. Jocks have already mostly been assimilated in the form of ‘gamers’ so now the focus has shifted to the historical unpopularity of the nerd lifestyle among girls. It’s only a matter of time before Harvard’s literature department is turned into an institute for the study of comic books, Mark Zuckerberg replaces George Washington on the dollar bill and future presidents of the US are delivering the inaugural address in Klingon.

The ascendancy of nerd values in 21st century America has become such that even forces of resistance must publicly adopt the mantle of the nerd to maintain their legitimacy. Jocks have already mostly been assimilated

This seems a bit overstated. The emergence of “brogrammer” culture in tech hardly represents the triumph of nerdism. More like the same old dudebro culture colonizing a formerly nerdy field because now there’s serious money to be made there. As to jocks, the Steubenville football players didn’t seem especially nerdy to me.

Anyway, most people I know who are into what I suppose you would classify as offensively nerdy interests (Star Trek, Game of Thrones, whatever) are voracious readers in general, so they also read Pynchon, Gaddis, Dickens, Elliot, Trollope & etc. & etc. It’s not either/or.

engels @198:

It’s only a matter of time before Harvard’s literature department is turned into an institute for the study of comic books, Mark Zuckerberg replaces George Washington on the dollar bill and future presidents of the US are delivering the inaugural address in Klingon.

Doesn’t sound too bad to me. Well, I suppose Harvard’s literature department should probably be spared, but multilingualism is to be approved of and I’ve always thought that the US is missing out on more interesting dollar bills by only ever putting long-dead presidents on them. Seeing Charles Darwin on a £5 note always makes me smile.

William Berry @179:

Not seeing a point here. Those are all terms of relatively recent origin, so zero at “zero hour” is precisely what you would expect.

The question was awareness of feminism as an issue generally. The unpredictable career arcs of faddish terms doesn’t speak to that at all.

The sudden appearance of several new terms linked to a specific field would suggest some development in that field, no?

We’ve already established that I lack the education you believe I should have had (in my defence, those are expensive now), but I was raised to believe in equality. Before reading any actual feminist literature, I would have said that I was probably a supporter of feminist goals without being particularly engaged, in the same sense in which I am vaguely supportive of other good causes with which I am not personally engaged. I could probably have given the right answers in a quiz on whether or not certain behaviours are morally acceptable, but I couldn’t have articulated any theory to describe why.

Now, what I encountered ~5 years ago was the sudden prominence of feminist views in places where they had not been found before, in particular tech discussion forums. People like Shanley Kane or Tim Chevalier or Julie Pagano or Julie Ann Horvath are not academic feminists, but are people who happen to work in the tech industry whilst also bringing a lot more feminist theory to bear on matters. They looked around and they formulated a feminist critique of the tech industry. I’m not saying that feminism didn’t exist before then, but the feminist critique of the tech industry really didn’t, and encountering that critique was, for many people, their first encounter with feminism. You might find that shocking, but I personally don’t; most of us don’t really encounter medical science until we become ill, at which point it becomes important to start learning about it. In fact, I think this is an encouraging story insofar as it represents an improvement over the status quo ante, in that there’s now some engagement where previously there was none.

My regret is that the process created more heat than light, and it often felt like there was a mutual incomprehension that was made worse by the adoption of rhetorical scripts in which feminists were seen as monomaniacal zealots (not always incorrectly, though mostly so) and people who challenged or disagreed with them were seen as unreconstructed sexists/misogynists (not always incorrectly, in fact this was often but not always the case). The very act of trying to distinguish oneself from the scripted tribe (“not all men…”) itself became a scripted action that one could be legitimately attacked for. The mistaken sense that feminism was here to destroy nerd culture rather than to complete it was the direct antecedent to Gamergate, and nobody figured out how to tell the truth with enough clarity in time to prevent the trainwreck.

Perhaps this is somewhat inevitable – tell people that a better world is possible, and they’ll take it as an implicit rebuke, as though you’re blaming them for the fact that the world they’ve built isn’t good enough for you. That certainly seems to explain a lot of reactionary thinking. Perhaps telling people that their open-source project could be more open to contributors will just make them feel defensive, because you kinda are saying that they have hitherto been sup-optimal human beings for failing to have a CoC. My sense is that this defensiveness can be overcome by including people in the process of defining the CoC, or even the decision over whether one is necessary at all. After all, the best way of getting someone to accept something is to make them think it was their idea all along. Interestingly, I think we can generalise this to the much broader question of how left-wing academic ideas achieve adoption in wider society – despite many of them being fairly obviously good ideas, there’s a strange amount of resistance and, anecdotally at least, this resistance often seems to come from the feeling that solutions are being imposed on people even if they’re supposed to benefit from them. I know we’ve wandered off-topic a bit, but I feel like this does still bear directly on the original post: governance relies on the consent of the governed, and you still need to solicit that consent even when you know you’re right.

My “whoops, I may have just made a bad argument” alarm went off just after posting that. In my final para, I am not trying to suggest that feminists trying to overturn oppression need to seek the consent of their oppressors to do so. I am assuming that the majority of the population have no particular interest in oppressing women, therefore it should be possible to achieve democratic consent for feminist-acceptable outcomes in most communities without needing to impose anything. That assumption may be wrong, and I don’t really know how to handle cases where it is.

If someone’s got a problem with you or something you’re doing, you aren’t entitled — not for a second! — to demand that that person “first” attempt to “work things out with you”.

This is true, and offers an opportunity to highlight one of the very interesting parts ot the speech linked in the OP (and to thank Sumana for both the link and having sparked an interesting discussion, which I’ve been wanting to do).

(emphasis mine)

We have the 4 social rules up on the wall, framed, at Hacker School, and sometimes people will, while referencing it, unconsciously turn their bodies towards them, because it’s that much in our core values. If you don’t understand why something you did broke the rules, you don’t ask the person who corrected you. You ask a facilitator. You ask someone who’s paid to do that emotional labor, and you don’t bring everyone else’s work to a screeching halt. This might sound a little bit foreign to some of us right now. Being able to ask someone to stop doing the thing that’s harming everyone else’s work and knowing that it will actually stop and that there’s someone else who’s paid to do that emotional labor who will take care of any conversation that needs to happen.

I thought that was a really striking observation, and example of how it’s interesting and helpful to have a small organization try to model behavior for how conflicts can be handled, given appropriate resources and sense of community.

That passage is talking about the advantages from the point of view of the person who’s annoyed, but this discussion makes clear that there’s also an advantage for the person who has been offensive — in that they have somebody they can talk to to try to work out a resolution to the problem.

Which, in this case, would lead me to support Martin Bento’s feeling that the ideal outcome would be one in which somebody who has a bad experience at a conference could talk to a organizer and trust that the situation would be resolved appropriately (which is obviously not often the case).

(Note, there’s a different “Nick S” who comments at CT more often than I do; I realize it’s inconvenient, so

Belle, so Adria instantly foresaw the whole shebang or something like it from the beginning. I take it this marks your abandonment of the “she couldn’t possibly have known what a ruckus she could create on Twitter” argument..Let’s see if this makes sense as an account of what Adria said. Here is the dialog in question:

“Ten months later, I was sitting opposite Adria Richards in a cafe at San Francisco airport. She seemed introverted and delicate, just the way Hank had come across over Google Hangout. She told me about the moment she overheard the comment about the big dongle.
“Have you ever had an altercation at school and you could feel the hairs rise up on your back?” she asked me.
“You felt fear?” I asked.
“Danger,” she said. “Clearly my body was telling me, ‘You are unsafe.’”
Which was why, she said, even though she’d never before complained about sexual harassment, she “slowly stood up, rotated from my hips, and took three photos”. She tweeted one, “with a very brief summary of what they said. Then I sent another tweet describing my location. Right? And then the third tweet was the [conference’s] code of conduct.”
“You talked about danger,” I said. “What were you imagining might…?”
“Have you ever heard that thing, men are afraid that women will laugh at them and women are afraid that men will kill them?” she replied. “So. Yeah.”
I told Adria that people might consider that an overblown thing to say. She had, after all, been at a tech conference with 2,000 bystanders.
“Sure,” she replied. “And those people would probably be white and they would probably be male.””

First of all, she cites her feeling of danger as the reason for her action, not as something she had to overcome. Admittedly, confronting someone who was not paying attention to you because you are afraid of them doesn’t make much sense, but that is one of the reasons I think Adria is b*llsh*tting. That is what she said. Secondly, when Jon asks her about the 2000 bystanders, he is talking about her immediate situation, and she responds in that light. If she were afraid of something that might happen later, the race and gender of the people around her at that moment would have been completely irrelevant. But she brings it up as a relevant fact. Nice try, but no. The dialog means what it seems to mean.
As for Hank’s volume, that is disputed. Adria says he spoke loudly; he says he was below normal conversational volume. Adria says the offensive remarks continued for several minutes, but we’re talking a couple of double entendres here. It’s hard to write a plausible dialog of these two jokes that lasts several minutes. The jokes will not stay funny that long. Adria has said several misleading or irrational things, which Hank has not. So I think Hank has more plausibility, but if you don’t think that is enough to assign hank greater credibility, then the matter is simply disputed. I see no basis for stipulating Adria’s version as fact. Also, Adria said nothing about Hank’s alleged volume in the initial tweet or blog post, but only said it later when she had to defend her actions. So the volume was not an issue in the initial tweetstorm.

On my suggestion, the important part is the privacy rule. I’m not even sure about the meta business, because the line between “bringing public pressure to bear” and “inviting in a mob” is pretty blurry.

On the issue of Hank’s company not having to listen to every feminist who complains, presumably more than one person complained. But, more fundamentally than that, one standard that is frequently heard in progressive circles,including in this very thread, is that the disadvantaged groups have the sole right to define what is an offense. The company is hearing from all these women ( a recognized disadvantaged group) who are saying that Hank’s behavior seriously offends them. Many would say otherwise, of course, but the company is not hearing from them. Do they even have the right to say: hey, this is not that serious a matter. We’re not going to fire the guy over it. Under the “disadvantaged define what is an offense” standard, I don’t see how they have any right to say that. So that would be my second suggestion: offenses are defined by broad consensus, not by the sole determination of the putative victims. Yes, this is likely to require some buy-in from within advantaged groups, but the fights against racism, sexism, homophobia, etc. have had a lot of success on precisely this basis. If white people had closed ranks against blacks in the 50s, if men had closed ranks against women in the 70s, if straight people had closed ranks against gays in the 80s, none of those movements would have had the success that they have.

And I never said I was opposed to codes of conduct per se. I never gave the matter much thought, so I don’t have a defined position.

There is an alternative explanation for the different outcomes for Richards and dongle-joke guy: dongle-joke guy worked as a software developer, and Richards worked as an evangelist. If a developer proves that they’re immature and can’t be trusted with representing the company at major events, they can be assigned to work that doesn’t involve going to conferences. An evangelist who can’t be trusted to behave within the CoC at conferences is unemployable, because going to conferences is the job. Dongle-joke guy also admitted that his actions were wrong, whereas I don’t believe Richards ever did. Even if we knew nothing at all about the gender of the individuals concerned, I think we’d predict the outcome fairly accurately.

(Of course, that’s not the whole story; the 4-chan reaction was very much about gender, and the nature of that reaction activated the ‘war’ script in which people had to choose sides and in which Richards could not admit having made a mistake in tweeting the pictures, preventing any opportunity to fix the situation once it got out of hand. To the extent that people think Richards was being irrational, we should probably be sympathetic to her particular irrationality given the backdrop of sexism/racism that clearly informed her behaviour).

Belle, I didn’t say anything in that statement about confrontation or tactics. “close ranks” means every single white person utterly opposes black civil rights. If that doesn’t happen, then the whites are not united on the question, and their ranks are not closed. If it does happen, blacks lose, period. They had then and have now neither the numbers nor the resources to force white people to do anything, and if they resort to violence, the whites can meet them with greater violence. The movement could not have succeeded without convincing a significant number of white people to support equality, at the cost of their own privilege. Sometimes this took confrontation and sometimes conversation, but whatever the method, the result had to be be white people willing to let blacks be treated equally. Not all white people, not even necessarily most (and some count more than others, e.g., the Supreme Court), but enough to tip the scales. The blacks by themselves did not have the power to compel the issue.

And my point is that the last several decades have shown that it is possible for disadvantaged groups to find support for equality among the advantaged, and they would have progressed very little otherwise. Which is why I don’t think it is necessary to say that only the disadvantaged get to say what is an offense and how serious it is (the former is not too meaningful without the latter), and why doing so lends itself to just this kind of abuse (I mean the complaints that got Hank fired).

As for why feminism has been semi-stalled for a few decades, I think there are vanishingly few blacks who do not support black civil rights or gays who do not support gay rights, but most women do not support feminism, though they may support specific feminist positions that have become fairly uncontroversial, such as equal pay. We can debate why this is, but until it changes, feminism will have a problem. You don’t represent someone unless they say you do, and feminism claims to represent women generally and does not. So my suggestion if you want to reinvigorate feminism is to go out and talk to, but especially listen to, non-feminist women and see what their objections are. If it’s just perception, that’s the easiest possibility, but I don’t think so, because feminism has been part of our culture for decades, it is taught in college, it has affected everyone’s life in identifiable ways – people do have some direct knowledge of it. And I’m sure there are some feminist groups doing exactly this, but it has to become the focus of enough attention that the information gleaned can have an effect on feminism generally.

I’m not sure how far spitballing the ‘donglegate’ scenario gets us. If you believe (as I assume most people here do) that people competent at their jobs shouldn’t lose them for trivial, stupid mistakes then it’s probably suffice to say Richard’s shouldnt have lost her job for this one misjudgment (imo, anyway, it was a misjudgment ). And that should be that. (unless you can *show* a pattern of behaviour her employers had identified and warned her about, which doesnt seem to be the case, as she lost it (afaict) as a consequence of the campaign waged against her) Whether or not she is a ‘nice’ person is beside the point, and really nothing anyone here (who are mainly dealing with after the fact narratives ) can really say.
I don’t know to what extent it’s applicable in the Richard’s case, but I think Belle’s point about trauma is a good one. I’d recommend to everyone ‘The Body Keeps the Score: Mind, Brain and Body in the Transformation of Trauma’, which made me rethink everything I didn’t know about how people experience, internalise and respond to traumatic experiences. I haven’t had time to sit down and read it cover to cover yet, so have only read bit and pieces, but it really is eye opening. (and will appeal even to those who consider themselves solely concerned with matters of empirically grounded scientific argument, or what have you)
(Anyway, ill leave it there, as it might be getting off topic)

No, Person A also talks to a neutral mediator. This is a better idea than it might sound at first pass, because people are naturally defensive when confronted with objections and may respond in haste with anger and worsen the situation, dragging in other irrelevant topics. (We’ve all seen this in our personal lives when we criticise family. “Well you do this annoying thing…etc.”) If the complaint comes in a bland, logically formatted way from a facilitator to Party B, Party B has a better chance of keeping their cool and responding in the best way they can to the complaint.

As I say, I’m not super-committed to the claim that Richards was absolutely right. It seems likely to me she was offended and reported the joke-makers to the people running the con as per the CoC and could have done an acceptable thing in doing so–that’s what the CoC was for. I don’t think she should have tweeted their photos. I also don’t think she intended to get the men fired any more than they intended to make her miserable by telling a stupid joke about dongles that we all have probably personally made ourselves (it can’t be only me, right?). I think that “trying to come up with a pretext for a fight” is a somewhat implausible state of mind for a person to be in when going to a professional conference, but nothing’s impossible. (Lax about watching what you say and expecting a different fellow audience than the one you have this year is a totally plausible state of mind to be in, by contrast.) It has been fine to talk to you although I have felt you are angry about the situation in a way that spills over onto your interlocutors, and I don’t think you needed to be so angry at me about it. I think we will have to agree to disagree and also agree that neither of us knows exactly what really went down.

Accidental response there.

What did I say to you or anyone else here that you regard as angry? I tend to ignore these Internet kerfuffles, so I never gave Adria Richards any thought before this thread. If I have answered at length, it is probably because I’m working out my thoughts on the matter on the spot. I’m just arguing forcefully, which is how I tend to argue. As for things that could be taken as angry at you – well, I did say you don’t get to simply stipulate that Hank was loud, but you were pressing the point without arguing for it, and treated my multiple arguments dismissively by dismissing one, and telling me to just stop. Shut up can also be taken as somewhat hostile, even if phrased less bluntly, though I did not so take it. And you LOL’d a point you evidently did not understand – which is fine. I just further explained my point.

OK cool. It’s not like I didn’t get het up at other people above. I just felt that I was going to some trouble to continue to engage in a reasonable spirit despite what I think are our (night-certain) fundamental disagreements, and you were like, “nice try, Waring! But no dice!” But it’s no big deal and LOL is probably equal in tone.

Is your name supposed to suggest Japanese boxed lunches, or not? I feel that it is, but perhaps this is giving me irrelevant associations about you, such as that perhaps someone’s mom got up really early to place a single pickled plum in a field of rice, Japanese flag style. [This is entirely irrelevant and not intended to be hostile. Merely idle.]