 Thank you. I'm more than a bit nervous about this talk, so I'm probably going to blather a bit First I want to thank you all for showing up and sticking throughout the day I know it's been a long day and there's a been a lot of technical talk here and some brains are melting, especially mine But more importantly, I want to thank Ben and Shane for pulling this conference off Hi It's an amazing event and it's just something that I could not pull off if I were to try So I want to give them a round of applause, please So my talks titled Occupy Ruby why we need to moderate the 1% I do need to go fast I screwed up big time with this talk first off. I agreed to do it This talk makes me more than a bit nervous I've done really technical talks before and done them without a butterfly flutter at all and this is a lot more complex of a topic and Yeah, it's also 30 minute slot and I have 112 slides although I guess is because of the scheduling snafu the 30 minute thing is not as big of a deal anymore So let's do some damage control first what I'm not talking about This is not meant to be an inflammatory talk It is not about airing dirty laundry. I will be using specific examples in order to talk for this talk to make sense to you But it's all laundry that's been aired before I've also heard that some people have expressed disdain for this talk well before anyone including myself has seen the slides, so I don't know what that's about This is not the talk you're assuming it is so please keep an open mind That said I think this talk is important and it needs to be said So I'm giving it I'd also like to say that I'm glad that Aja and Katrina and others could talk about The nerdy things that they're passionate about instead of yet another girl having to talk about being a girl in tech I think that gets real old for them and so So this next slide won't make as much sense if you weren't here last year how many people were here last year I'll be talking about my feelings Sorry for those who were not here last year. That's purely a joke So what I will be talking about is community our community The undesired undesired behavior within it and what we can do about it So let's get started community Community is the condition of sharing or having certain attitudes and interest in common and for that For us that is Ruby So what do we want in our community? I think I speak for everyone here and and elsewhere that for the most part we want to have fun programming and Ruby And I speak for most of us or at least a goodly number of us When I say that we also want to help others learn Ruby so they can have fun programming Ruby too because why not bring them into the cult And more than anyone I believe Matt's embodies this after all his design of the Ruby programming language itself the syntax the libraries and everything else was to emphasize having fun and programming the fact that we've got Enumerators as beautiful as they are and block passing the way it is is because he wants programming to be fun And he's designed for that purpose And we've adopted this embodiment and we've called it minus one so everyone sing along if you can Matt's is nice and so we are nice But nice is not commutative not everyone is nice back and Even a minority population this can be poisoned to our community So how do we keep the community healthy? I think the first thing you need to do is you need to frame the metaphor right and I believe that for us a Walled garden metaphor is actually a really good one and I didn't know much about walled gardens when I started this talk So in researching them I found out they were really fascinating first off their walled primarily for horticulture reasons They're not for security reasons. They're not trying to keep people out from the flowers. I mean You do get some benefit in the fact that Animals that would normally eat your plants are kept out for the most part, but that's not the purpose The purpose is those walls help raise the ambient temperature several degrees and they contain their own distinct stable microclimates throughout the walled garden Allowing you in something like a north tempered zone to have things like fruit trees and tropical botanicals that you're able to grow your round And if we look at a simple map of an example walled garden, you can see the level of complexity throughout I don't know which direction is supposed to be north here But if you look at the designs they often design the south-facing wall to have the stuff that needs the most heat because the Walls themselves will hold on to heat like a battery and release it throughout the night You can have things like fruit trees and botanicals and everything else throughout the garden and each area can be designed to be Stable for its own specific requirements. I think that fits us really well because we have a bunch of different subgroups within the Ruby community. We have people that love to do rails. We have people like me who haven't touched rails in a year For us our walled garden consists of the following mediums. There's IRC mailing lists Twitter blogs regional groups and national conferences and then of course our workplace so It's fair to say that right now our walled garden is a fairly healthy and welcoming environment for most people and It lets us have fun and help others But walled gardens require constant upkeep to remain we remain healthy and balanced Without this upkeep you start finding up like the Python community where it's pretty cold to anyone trying to get into it So we've talked about community. Let's talk about what we don't want in our community is where things start to get a little messy Detractors and I think this is the the thesis of my point Detractors pull our attention from helping newcomers and from having fun ourselves They make things seem less inviting to outsiders so we get less people coming in But bad behavior is simply not acceptable, but it's defined by us For me that looks like this Assholes trolls help vampires and crazies. Please notice the air quotes and the literal quotes So to help figure out what that means I've written the nerds field guide to identifying weeds Weeds are anything you don't want in your garden whether they're good or acceptable or not Roses can be weeds if you're trying to grow strawberries So let's start off with the easiest one the assholes. They are by far the easiest to identify and I'm not Talking about people that disagree with you. That's not necessarily an asshole depending on how they go about disagreeing with you I'm talking about the racists the misogynists and the people who are assholes for the sake of being assholes Which can be confused with what I'm calling an uber troll Iconically though I think it's fair to say that zed Shaw is an asshole. I'm not even going to bother reading this quote I find it inflammatory. You can read it on your own if you want to And before anyone gets upset that I'm calling Zed an asshole one. I don't think he would disagree And to I've had dinner with him. I've spent time with him and I've supposedly nearly gotten into a physical altercation with him in New York I'm gonna make a judgment call here. He's an asshole Luckily outside of our community. We had Rethinking best practices in Java E6 Java 1 2011 where someone is giving a talk where he was trying to talk about describing something highly technical and originally the slides said how to explain it to a woman and he was talked into changing that to how to explain it to an alien and Then added an extra slide about how it used to be explained it to a woman. So it was at least just as bad in 2009 only had an unfortunate talk given at gogaruko called couch DB perform like a porn star I Think it's fair to say that the speaker had no intention of this talk being inflammatory Or offensive, but it was What was an asshole thing was how the backlash was handled? That could have been handled a lot better Sorry Drawing up He didn't apologize. I'm sorry you were offended is not an apology Didn't try to understand those that he did offend and argued and rationalized. I Have a wife does not mean it's not sexist If he just said oh god, you're right. I fucked up bad judgment. I'll fix the slides and republish them So they can be viewed at work. I'm sorry all of the backlash would have been done there and then and Last but not least and this I need to emphasize happened in the last month all I can say is wow and In case you think this is an isolated event it's not and In particular this person is a notable person in our community and I think this should not be allowed Moving on Trolls slightly harder to identify than assholes in part because that's part of what being a troll is I'm going to use the old-school definition for the most part Which is taking perverse positions to create havoc derail conversations and get attention But as my last bullet points out Trolls are a much more complex problem than that. They're not the old-school trolls were used to is not used that anymore They've gotten sophisticated And there's a there's a very good talk given by ill doctrine That I think you should go over called how to or why we should feed the trolls It's very insightful. I only watched it a few days ago And I think it it broadens the scope that trolls contain But I'm not prepared to address all of that and I don't think we have necessarily all those problems They are mostly found online. They generally favor anonymity But not always and our iconic troll is Giles Boquette who actually said Published the Ruby community needed to rise up against Chad Fowler Murder him twice dismember his corpse set the remains on fire and desecrate the ashes with urine If there was a more troll-ish Statement out there. I don't know it and I don't want to Next up are help vampires help vampires are an odd one They're kind of like trolls and that you're not quite sure up front What they're about? But I'm not going to go into defining them too much because Amy Hoy's Help vampires a spotter's guy did a perfect job and I'm gonna provide a link to that at the end of my talk Needless to say they suck up a lot of our time and what they do is they prevent us from helping focus Our time and attention on the newcomers that really need our time next up Crazies again with the air quotes. I use that term very loosely. It doesn't necessarily have anything to do with mental illness at all And sometimes they're hard to identify sometimes. They're really really easy, but basically They're not necessarily offensive They just make you feel uncomfortable and distract you on a near constant basis and in many ways In some ways, they are absolutely innocent But they're still not desirable within our wall garden on a context or meet per medium basis In some cases, they're just fine if they're via IRC and they're not fine going to user group or vice versa It really depends In our case we had someone that we dubbed captain gummy bear He is a XC LRB member and he would come to our meetings and Randomly we'd get outbursts of gummy bear and yummy gummy What have you and Finally an extension of the crazies are the good crazies and I'm not saying that these guys should be Are considered undesirable We have someone named Ron Evans down in LA who if you've had the opportunity of seeing his talks They're amazing and if you haven't please seek him out go see one of his talks I have watched he and his brother have ruby programmable zeppelins He's worked on Raspberry Pi in part with his effort on kids ruby He's done a lot to try to bring really creative ways of encouraging programming amongst Others especially kids his effort on kids ruby is amazing. He is absolutely Turned up to 11 at all times his talks are very energetic and very intense and kind of exhausting But they're they're inspiring and they're amazing and I think we should all see him out And iconically we've got why the lucky stiff and while He self imploded in our community and pulled himself out and disappeared I Don't think anyone can really argue the point that he didn't do more than anyone else to inspire and bring more people into our community and energize us and Get us going Both of them have done an amazing job of inspiring creativity and I think they need to be Lauded for that and if anything we need more of these they're they're good examples of what we want but remember That it's more about the behavior than the person and I'm gonna cite ill doctrine again He has an awesome talk Which is how to tell someone they sound racist Which is much different than how to tell someone they're racist And I think that can be applied to anything that I'm talking about here that it's about the behavior Not the person themselves and that everyone should have a chance to redeem themselves. That's very important So we've talked about our community. We've talked about the behavior. We don't want within it What can we do about it? I? Went to a little hippie school in Olympia, Washington called the Evergreen State College and I learned computer science in a way that worked for my brain really well there, but I also learned Very ineffective forms of protest For the most part that meant Chaining yourself to a tree the day before it was supposed to be bulldozed. I Think it's better to understand the system and work it from the inside Proactively than it is to react to something before as it's too late knee-jerk reaction does not work and in this sense. That's what this talk is about We have our own Organization here in Seattle called Occupy Seattle and I don't know if it's a direct offshoot or if it's a sister organization They have the noise brigade and every Wednesday night They started the community college just down the street from where I live and walk around town and bang pots Do you feel inspired? Yeah Banging pots does not affect change and making a lot of noise for us does not necessarily affect change so let's Focus on on how to tend to our wall garden. I think we should strive to improve signal to noise We should strive towards dialogue We should ban in mediums where we have control and in mediums where we don't have control we should shun I think shunning is a really powerful tool that is now really underused in our society But I know that ban and shun raise red flags for people especially nerds and in that I want to cite the online paper geek social fallacies and Specifically point out geek social fallacy number one ostracizers are evil I'm gonna try to read this but between the light and the dryness My eyes are really drying up. I don't want you to read all this I'm gonna just point out specific subsets in its pathological form GSF one prevents its carrier from participating in or tolerating the exclusion of anyone from anything and no matter How obnoxious offensive or aromatic that perspective excluding may be If GSF one exists in sufficient concentration and it usually does it is impossible to expel a person who actively detracts from every social event It is okay for us To oh, it really did crash and it really lost my notes I think in this sense Minus one is employed too much Minus one is about us having fun and being nice to each other and Cooperating and participating it is not meant to include every asshole if they're an asshole I Think it can be abused and used in passive-aggressive ways in that sense But the reaction to any of these behaviors should be modeled to the context So when we see trolling or asshole behavior on IRC or a mailing list, then I think that we should ban with impunity When we have misogyny at a conference and I'm gonna quote here Who are you here with oh? So you're a designer What you code wow We should shun those people Ask how to read on Twitter or on a blog then unsubscribe stop reading it and Something I really want to draw extra attention to perhaps because I'm giving this talk If you have an offensive speaker, I think you should stand up and walk out. So when I say Can't we all just agree that women don't want to program? Aja is demonstrating that you should stand up for 15 to 30 seconds make yourself known and seen but don't be rude shake your head no and Leave don't come back Please go tell the conference organizer why you left a particular talk. They don't necessarily have time to review all of the talks And they certainly only get proposals most of the time not the actual talks themselves They're also not necessarily in the room with you. So they need to know these things and Specifically, I want you to lead the way you don't wait for someone else to stand up first You be the first to do it and they'll follow you finally If you have a misogynistic and racist team member on your BDD framework, I Think you should revoke the commit bit and disavow that person Distance yourself from them. Otherwise you're implicitly condoning their behavior But whatever your action Whatever your action stop feeding them your energy get away from them shun them and They're going to wither So some specific examples We had an ex-member many many years ago. We had an ex-member of Seattle R. B Who actually said despite my jadedness? I do think when it would be great if there were more chicks in programming. I Get tired of looking at dudes all day long Then again, they got to be at least cute chicks. Otherwise. What's the point? So I talked to him that night on I am and via email and he was unrepentant I talked to our other leaders in the group and we all decided to employ the band hammer that night I was criticized for not doing it publicly, but my job is to tend the garden not to flog people and I think that that worked out well The other example captain gummy bear He started coming to our group because he was going to a local Ruby class and he was a help vampire. He would literally walk From person to person Asking them essentially to do his homework We redirected redirected that and I thought we did a good job of it But eventually he just kept coming to the meetings and wouldn't work on Ruby. He would just look at Google Maps the entire night and Randomly outburst gummy bear and yummy gummy Which we were tolerating for a while, but eventually someone came to me and said, you know, I'm getting increasingly uncomfortable with this and so we I Emailed him behind the scenes. I didn't make a scene out of it I emailed him behind the scenes and asked him politely if if he would leave and he politely agreed And I think that worked out best for all parties involved and IRC because it is such an immediate medium and because it is such a Really accessible medium, especially for newcomers who want to be able to come in and say I'm working on this thing And it's raising this method missing thing I've never heard of and what's a nil and all that stuff we can answer questions immediately and and really help people But as a result it needs to be absolutely inviting to the noobs If we have a troll Especially a persistent troll then they're gonna wind up with a band and if they keep it up They're gonna wind up with a lifetime band. Most of our bands are ten minutes long We start by taking away their voice if it gets worse We just kick him out of the room and don't let him back in If they persist we make sure that everyone knows that person's not to be unbanned Racist remarks gone. We had someone make a negative remark about a notable trans woman in our community gone But much more than a number of bands we've handed out because there are a limited number of bands that we can hand out We've managed a lot of people's behavior and said, you know, that's not cool You need to turn this around and it's worked for the most part as a result. We have a very active IRC channel That's very helpful to others Whatever their motivations are they want attention Attention includes you staying in their talk It includes the negative reactions. It includes all of it. It's the whole Negative publicity is still publicity thing So don't feed them The confidence conference incidents because we have leaders coming to conferences, they're usually well documented They usually have a lot of Backlash that is loud and volatile. I Think in most cases silent shunning would have worked better Not always and I'm not condoning the volatile backlash. I think that it is necessary And it is certainly communication But what happens is the backlash is backlash Starts up and it's defensive and often hostile in the case of perform like a porn star Everything exploded all at once so you could see it on IRC you could see it on Twitter blogs the dev chicks mailing us I've been told I'm not a member They all exploded at once Pretty furious with this talk and I think Josh Susser the the organizer of go-go-go He did a really exceptional job of handling it But it was post-mortem and I think that we would have done a better job if we'd shunted actively if if everyone Had who was offended by this talk had stood up and walked out. It can't be argued with and instead Yeah, whatever sitting there on its abuse instead. I think that sitting through that talk is It gives wiggle room to the rationalizations And the defensiveness and as a result of this talk the Parni presentation bingo card was created So you could see how many different types of defensive reaction there was to the critique in the first place But I want to draw out one in particular Lighten up. It was only a joke there've been a number of cases in just the last couple months where Someone did something questionable and Someone had the bravery to stand up there and then and say something about it and they got verbally accosted Real time and I think that's wrong Basically, what you're doing in that case is you're trying to censor criticism and I think that is absolutely wrong in All cases I think that criticism assuming Most of it is constructive criticism should be absolutely encouraged So for example in the case of the MongoDB talk Ruby like a porn star if the shoe were on the other foot if you've ever seriously used the word programmer If the talk wasn't this and wasn't instead this Assuming that made you uncomfortable and if it doesn't just pretend assuming that made you uncomfortable You wouldn't accept Lighten up. It was only a joke if you stood up and said hey, that's wrong. That shouldn't have been done That's not professional You wouldn't ever accept that. So why would you accept someone to do it when the shoes on the first foot in the first place? Further I think that all the hostility that comes out of these events make us as a community look bad They make it less inviting for newcomers regardless of their gender orientation or otherwise and it prevents us from having fun and helping others so What's the conclusion? Ruby is what we make of it and More than that It's what we make it for others if we want new blood fresh blood to come in and bring new ideas and new ways of doing things and Crazy talks about prologue and refactoring if we want those things then we need to make it inviting It doesn't take much effort to deal with the undesired behavior And it doesn't take much to maintain our walled garden and doing so make this a better place for all of us Like last year this clicker is getting weird like last year. I have one more thing Last year for those who weren't here. I Encouraged everyone to throw their pre ground black pepper out and to buy fresh black pepper Because if there's anything that'll improve your life. It's that This year I have version 1.5 of my ginger beer recipe I like my ginger and I like it strong. So that's a bit much. You might want to scale it back for your first batch But this has gone through five iterations and is delicious. They will be on my website Thank you and for those