Anti-harassment Policy for Open Source Conferences

ROSE Blog: Rikki's Open Source Exchange

Dec 02, 2010 GMT
Rikki Kite

Valerie Aurora wrote an excellent article for lwn.net, The Dark Side of Open Source Conferences. Currently, the article is only available to lwn.net subscribers, but you can write to Valerie to get the link, or wait until the post is publicly available in a few days.

In her article, Valerie talks about the bad experiences several women have had at open source events over the years, and she discusses the recently created generic anti-harassment policy for open source conferences. "Judging from the past ten years of my experience, harassment at open source conferences is not going to stop all by itself. We have to take action," she says.

Valerie says that she decides which events to attend based on the reputation of the event organizers, feedback from friends, and any personal experiences she's had with the events. "For example, anything run by the Linux Foundation will be extremely professional, respectful of women, and rank high on the getting-stuff-done factor" she says. I agree with her take on Linux Foundation events, and I'll add that Linux Foundation event organizers make extra efforts to foster a professional, friendly, diverse, and productive environment.

If you'd like your favorite open source event to adopt an anti-harassment policy, check out the list of events and email addresses provided in a Geek Feminism blog post, Get your conference conference anti-harassment policy here!

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Comments

  • Geek in trianing

    It's sad that women can be web designer and so on but in open source we're still considered 99 Cents Store programmers sad


    I'm just learning open source and even though I'm reading about the prejudice against women and open source programming I'm still going for it - but I'm disappointed and not expecting much help for the males in this sad

    Right now I'm trying to learn a couple of new open source software programs and I am not lying when I say the very BEST resource I've found is www.opensourcevarsity.com

  • The scientific method

    I heard about a research that was done a while ago involving lab mice.

    They herded a large bunch of male mice in one cage for several years, having no contact with females and naturally, no mating.
    Then they introduced two females to the cage.

    The results were surprising:
    40% clamored around the females flaunting and fighting, that was fairly expected.
    What was not expected was:
    30% completely ignored the females and were busy participating in something that seemed like role playing, 10% went insane
    9.9% were annoyed of the females taking the concentration of the majority from the important matters at hand

    One specimen got a muse, became sentient and wrote the linux kernel.

    Women are a great thing to have around, and the best programming team leaders I met so far were women.

    Oh, and it's not a real research, mice don't do D&D and Linus isn't a mouse.
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