The dark side of open source conferences

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In the past two decades, the open source community has evolved from an obscure grass-roots movement of wild-eyed crusaders, indigent grad students, and spare-time hobbyists to an unprecedented worldwide collaboration of full-time professionals and extraordinarily committed volunteers. We pride ourselves on our openness to new contributors, from any country or social background, and most often describe the power structure of open source projects as a meritocracy. Many of us believe that open source is inherently progressive - a way to level the playing field that operates across all social categories and class boundaries.

And yet, here it is, the year 2010, and my female friends and I are still being insulted, harassed, and groped at at open source conferences. Some people argue that if women really want to be involved in open source (or computing, or corporate management, etc.), they will put up with being stalked, leered at, and physically assaulted at conferences. But many of us argue instead that putting up extra barriers to the participation of women will only harm the open source community. We want more people in open source, not fewer.

In this article, we will first explore the current state of harassment in open source through interviews with ten women (including myself) about their experiences at open source conferences. Then we will describe some concrete, simple actions anyone can take to help reduce harassment for everyone, not just women (who have no monopoly on being the target of harassment). In particular, we'll discuss the recently released generic anti-harassment policy for open source conferences - basically, HOWTO Not Be A Jerk At A Conference.

Interviews

I interviewed by email nine women about their experiences at open source conferences. Harassment can and does happen to anyone of any gender identity or persuasion (just ask anyone who has been to middle school), but I know enough to write about only two kinds of harassment: the kind you get for being female, and the kind you get for using Emacs. I strongly encourage other people to write about their experiences being harassed at conferences, as harassment is an important problem no matter who it happens to.

The women I interviewed are: Cat Allman, FOSS community organizer at Google and event professional, Donna Benjamin, executive director of Creative Contingencies, Beth Lynn Eicher, an organizer of Ohio LinuxFest, Selena Deckelmann, major contributor to PostgreSQL and founder of Open Source Bridge, Mackenzie Morgan, Ubuntu developer, Deb Nicholson, an organizer of LibrePlanet and the FSF Women's Caucus, Noirin Shirley, Executive VP at Apache Software Foundation, Sarah "Sez" Smith, and one anonymous respondent. I interviewed myself for a tenth woman. Nine of us have been harassed at one or more conferences. Of the nine of us who have served as conference organizers, eight of us have dealt with at least one incident of harassment at a conference we were running.

First, I asked each person about their first open source conference: Which one was it, what year, and what do you remember the most?

Cat Allman recalls the atmosphere at the 1998 forerunner of OSCON: It was "Joyous pandemonium: it was a gathering of the tribes, a religious festival, the morning of the first day of a Children's Crusade; so much passion and belief in one room." Donna Benjamin went to LCA 2006 "Intending to stay just for the miniconfs, but having such an awesome time, meeting awesome people and changing my flights to stay for the whole week." Sarah Smith loved the "grass roots feel" of LCA 2002. Selena Deckelmann says of LISA 1997: "I felt energized and enjoyed meeting new people - students and professionals - and talking about all the free software we all used to do our work."

My first open source conference was Ottawa Linux Symposium 2002. I was surprised by how nice the other kernel developers were in person. People I knew as unholy terrors on the mailing lists smiled and shook my hand and said, "How nice to finally meet you in person!" I ended up inviting ten or so people back to my hotel room to play the TCP/IP Drinking Game, including (to my delighted newbie surprise) Alan Cox and Rusty Russell.

Next, I asked about a time each person felt uncomfortable at a conference. Unfortunately, this was an easy question to answer for most. Anonymous says:

One event a group of men put print-outs of Hans Reiser on sticks and carried them around. They approached women (and possibly men) to tell us that every time we use ext3, Reiser will kill another woman. Later someone was caught taking up-skirt photos of my friend's partner.

Mackenzie Morgan says,

A presenter had a title slide followed by a slide of bikini-clad women holding laptops, which he said was just to get people to pay attention. I'm not sure if we were supposed to pay attention to the women or to what he was saying though.

Selena Deckelmann says:

I give talks, organize and spend a lot of time in conference booths, I frequently have to deal with conference attendees ignoring me and asking questions of male colleagues standing next to me because they think that I am non-technical.

For Selena, as for many women, it's a double-bind: "I have to be very aggressive when initiating conversation to get people to talk with me about technical subjects," but then her behavior is "incorrectly interpreted as flirting." Beth Lynn had the same experience: "I was at a conference where a man mistook my friendliness and technical interest as sexual attraction to him." Mackenzie says, "At one conference, it was implied that another engineer was only agreeing with me on a technical matter because I would pay him back with a sexual favor later."

Cat Allman says that computer conferences have come a long way in the last 25 years - but that they still have a long way to go. She says of a conference in the mid-1980s: "Male attendees would walk up to you - even if you were in a group - and ask 'How much for a (sex act)?' You tried hard not get in an elevator in the convention center alone." Now, women hired to wear company polo shirts and g-strings (true story) are rare outside of Las Vegas, but the problem of a sexualized environment remains:

I go to technical conferences for business, technical content and fellowship, not to hook up or engage in voyeurism. If I go to CES in Vegas I go with the understanding that porn is part of the business of that conference, but I find overt sexual behaviors unexpected and off-topic at FOSS conferences.

Deb Nicholson says the days of "eye candy" are far from over. She says of an event held within the last two years, "When strippers were hired to mix with people at the Saturday night event everyone attended, that made everyone uncomfortable."

Three of the ten women reported being physically assaulted at a conference. Mackenzie says, "I was grabbed from behind and kissed by a stranger without permission." Later she found out that this person assaulted another woman at the conference. Noirin Shirley says after a man grabbed and kissed her at a conference after-party, she told him she wasn't interested, and "He responded by jamming his hand into my underwear and fumbling." At the Linux Storage and Filesystems Workshop 2007, I organized a group outing to a pub, only to have one of the invited workshop attendees grab my ass while I was having a completely normal conversation. (I told him to never touch me again, warned my friends about him, and refused to speak to him again.)

Next, I asked about how people decide which conferences to attend. Besides the obvious factors - time, location, travel funding, speaker status, who is attending - reputation of conference organizers and attendee behavior came out as a major factor.

Beth Lynn says, "If the conference has a reputation for encouraging unprofessional behaviour such as a sexual environment, I will not go. For this reason I am not attending Penguicon any more." Cat says, "If I think an event organizer turns a blind eye to questionable behavior I'll pass on the event." Noirin Shirley says, "It's word-of-mouth and knowing some of the organizers, knowing that they're not going to put on an event where bad behaviour is tolerated." I base my decision on three major elements: the reputation of the conference organizers, the word-of-mouth from my friends, and my past experience at that conference (if any). For example, anything run by the Linux Foundation will be extremely professional, respectful of women, and rank high on the getting-stuff-done factor.

I only stopped attending one open source conference altogether because of consistently bad behavior of both attendees and the organizers: the Ottawa Linux Symposium. This was a difficult decision for me because, at the time, attending OLS was almost a requirement for any serious Linux kernel developer, since that's where a lot of the face-to-face design work and discussion got done. But every year I attended, I was insulted, lewdly propositioned, or groped by several people, by everyone from newbies to top Linux kernel developers. This happened even though I was a speaker, BOF organizer, or program committee member for five years. The organizers appeared to condone the behavior by doing things like giving a wink-wink nudge-nudge review of conference shenanigans before the keynote, and "playfully" nagging attendees not to bring girlfriends or women they picked up on the street to the conference parties. (Message: OLS is for men, women go home.) I complained to the conference organizers but got no response.

After OLS 2006, I decided that I cared about being treated respectfully more than I cared about advancing my career, and stopped attending OLS. Luckily for me, the Linux Plumbers Conference started soon after, and I volunteered to help get Plumbers off the ground, in large part because the organizers were clearly committed to creating a professional, welcoming, get-things-done atmosphere. To be fair, it's been a few years since these incidents, and the OLS organizers have gone their separate ways, so I wouldn't be surprised if they have had a change of heart about what makes a good conference.

Changing the atmosphere

So how we do we go about changing the culture of open source conferences so that we don't chase off the very people we want to attract, both women and men? 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.

A good first step is for conferences and communities to adopt and enforce explicit policies or codes of conduct that spell out what kind of behavior won't be tolerated and what response it will get. Much in the way that people don't stop speeding unless they get speeding tickets, or that murder is totally unacceptable to most people but laws against it still exist, harassment at conferences may seem obviously wrong, but stopping it will require written rules and enforceable penalties.

To get things started, I helped write a customizable, general-purpose anti-harassment policy for open source conferences. For online communities, the Ubuntu code of conduct is a good place to start.

If you want to do something personally to help stop harassment, you have a few options. You can email the organizers of conferences you like to attend asking if they have a policy for dealing with harassment, and suggesting this one as an example. (You can find a list of conferences and their contact email addresses in this blog post about the policy.) If you are a conference organizer, you can skip the middleman and adopt the policy yourself. If you have the Internet, you can write a blog entry and post on your favorite short-message site about the policy. And, finally, if you see harassment happening or hear people bragging about it, you can speak up and stop it yourself.

Donna Benjamin says, "We want harassment not to happen in the first place, because dealing with it is so deeply unpleasant for all concerned. But with silence and inaction, women just stop coming to events, and harassers keep harassing." What Donna is suggesting is something we can all work towards: a time when polices like this are no longer needed. I'm going to work for that time. Will you join me?



