On Tue, May 10, 2011 at 10:21 AM, Jos Poortvliet
On 2011-05-09 Greg wrote:
On Mon, May 9, 2011 at 11:31 AM, Jos Poortvliet
wrote: Hi all,
I'd like to have a code of conduct or anti-harassment policy at our conference, see for reasons my latest blog at http://blog.jospoortvliet.com
I made a draft: http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Code_of_Conduct
Please, any input is more than welcome! But read before replying, there is a FAQ already so don't ask what is answered there ;-)
Cheers, Jos
(resend)
If the primary concern is sexual harassment, the US military instituted a fairly simple rule 10+ years ago that seems to work for them.
In addition to a document which defines harrasment, they instituted a green light, yellow light, red light system.
If in discussion a person feels the conversation is veering into questionable territory, they can say yellow light. I think the others are to take that as, your close to the line, but didn't go over it.
If someone says "red light", then the line was crossed and the person should immediately stop whatever they were doing.
I believe the fundamental reason for that is what Per is saying, what is appropriate varies from culture to culture, person to person, and sometimes even time to time.
Thus what might be in appropriate in the first few minutes of meeting someone, may become a welcome advance at the end of the second private dinner together.
But with the traffic light system, when I guy makes crude but not totally inappropriate statement, a woman can simply say "yellow light". Meaning you didn't offend me, but that's as far as it going so don't try anything else.
One thing I believe they liked about this system was it was intuitively obvious and did not require a lot of instruction.
ie. ==== What did you do after she said red-light?
She was just playing hard to get, so I tried to kiss her.
Guilty - bye. ==== Greg
While I think it is a very good protocol for situations where there is a clear issue and a tension is present, I think it is a bit overkill for our conference. I even believe we'd run the risk of making these issues so visible we'd get a self-fullfilling prophecy.
In other words, I agree with Helen and incidentally love her "How Not To Be A Loser" joke :D
I disagree. The things you posted which were the most egregious revolved around unwelcome passes, touches, hugs, kisses, not stuff said by a presenter. I assume those unwelcome actions take place during social times, not sitting in the audience of a presentation. In the US, we could adopt a key phrase of "Woah", thus if a guy in this case starts saying stuff that's inappropriate or putting his hand on her knee, the woman could just say Woah and hopefully that would be that. So moving to a different take on it, assume that 5 people are talking over lunch and someone starts making racial jokes that someone else feels is inappropriate, they would just need to say Woah, and the jokester would know his jokes weren't going over very well. A keyword to make it clear to the clueless seems very helpful. We have to accept that a lot of technically brilliant people simply have no idea where the line is, let alone that they crossed it long ago. Greg -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org