 Welcome everybody to our word camp ethics discussion. We have a fantastic panel for you this morning and we're going to be answering a couple of really big questions and really getting into what I think will be a deep discussion and a very profitable discussion about ethics in this community. I'm going to let everybody take the opportunity to introduce themselves and we'll go down the panel. This is great because I was going to have the women introduce themselves first so this works out for her. Hi everyone, my name is Andrea Middleton. I've been working with and supporting the WordPress open source community organizing team since 2011, helping word camp organizers and meet up organizers build communities in WordPress. My name is Doris Brogan. I am a lawyer and I teach law at the University School of Law, Charles Wager School of Law. I teach ethics among other things, I teach our legal profession and ethics course. I also have dabbled around in the First Amendment and privacy which are kind of conflicting, have a lot of internal conflict with those two areas. I know Liam's wife who's the most brilliant wonderful person I know and that's why I'm here. It's nice enough but I'm here because of Michelle. Thank you for being here. My name's Liam Dempsey. I've been involved with the WordPress community since 2011 and since 2012 I've been relying on Andrea as a local meetup organizer and a local word camp organizer. I'm here on this panel today because I am a lead organizer for this immediate word camp. My name is Jason Coleman. I'm the CEO of Paid Memberships Trome and Lead Developer. I've been developing with WordPress and using it since about 2005 but most recently now owning a business in the plug-in product space. So I'm here representing both the user and developer of WordPress and the small business owner. Last and least, I am Simeon Poles. I'm an associate at the law firm between Mars to about 800 or so. I'm a law firm with 26 offices around the world. I practice in the areas of whatever a partner wants me to do plus data privacy, cybersecurity and intellectual property. So I come at this as an outsider but those things keep me sort of technologically adjacent so hopefully it all works out for us today. I want to make a couple of announcements before we get started with the content. Obviously this is a free flowing thing. There are other discussions happening if people need to go, people are coming in, please feel free to do that. Don't feel like you're locked in. And of course if we bore you to tears, make for the door. Which pretend it's going to have something else to do. Right. And of course we'll be around for questions for about a half hour or so afterward. This might go, I mean depending on how this goes, this could go over and if people also need to leave for that, feel free. But we will be around and happy to entertain questions later on. So why don't we just sort of put out there, I'm sure people have seen the materials, the general questions that we're going to try to address today. The first question being how should a community's ethics be applied to event speakers, sponsors, volunteers and vendors? And then the second question being in our businesses and as a community, how do we develop and implement policies that reflect our ethics and values? Huge questions. We are sort of discussing this around particular developments that have taken place and so I'm going to throw it to Liam just to give a flavor for the genesis of those questions and sort of how we're coming at the issues going through the discussion. Thank you. So in late July or early August our organizing team became aware that one of our global sponsors, a web host, DreamPost is hosting the American Nazi Party website and as a team of organizers we were concerned about that and as a team we were concerned in different ways and at different levels, we weren't universal in our concerns but all of us thought it was a problem at some point and at some level, not at some point, at some level. And as we began to look into it a little bit more, we realized that some of the other sponsors of the program did business with organizations that some of us found similarly troubled. And with that in mind, we were kind of in a little bit of a spot of bother because it was already August and we had to either plan a word camp or not. So we reached out to Andrea and her team to flag up our concerns and to begin to try to address the problem in some meaningful or constructive way. And as part of that, constructive addressing of this very real problem, what we have today among other things is this panel. So this conversation is an outgrowth of those initial conversations. So as we sort of prepared to do this, we kind of kicked around some ideas and one of the things that we wanted to get right was what are the fundamental assumptions about this community that make this, allow us to kind of figure out what the answers to the big questions are. So there are three more or less fundamental assumptions that we came up with. One is that word press as a community is a relatively high functioning community, but one that has little formal governance. There's general agreement around the core values in the community, so things like open collaboration and sharing and respect for everyone, civility in the way that we interact with each other, inclusivity. And so therefore this discussion will focus on a couple of things. One, how do you promote inclusivity? Two, living by, how does the community live by its core values with respect to people who don't share, do or do not share those values? And may or may not get benefits as being part of the community. And then three, whether or not you refuse to accept the benefits that might, or sponsorship with people that whose values or actions or activities you don't think fit the community's guidelines, as Elaine was just mentioning. So let's jump into the sort of the first kind of big ticket item here. And I'll start with you Andrea. What are the values of inclusivity as you see them for the word press community? How does the word press community go about as we're seeing them? I think that the word press community has some well-established values around collaboration, around openness and transparency. And I think in the past, I would say sixish, maybe sevenish years, we've had kind of a concomitant interest in how inclusivity fosters that sense of open participation and is in many ways required for us to achieve the kind of the numbers and the interaction and the numbers of different people who participate in making our software better every day. And so what we have, what kind of conversationally over the years are very loose community that hasn't always identified itself as a community and slowly started kind of identifying who we are and what we care about. We've also recognized that inclusivity and creating a welcoming space is not only something that a lot of us believe in personally, but that is a necessary element for open source to work because if people don't feel safe and included in, safe to share and included in the conversation, then we can't benefit from the free and open bizarre of conversation and of collaboration that makes open source functional in the first place. We have some formalized definitions of personal aspects of humans that we want to make sure we include or more specifically we have some formalized lists of ways that we don't want people to discriminate against other people in the community. I'm not sure that we're doing our best work in recruiting outside of our existing community necessarily, but that's something certainly that a lot of us are striving toward. But I think we are reaching a kind of a critical mass within the huge number of people who collaborate in our project, finally with recognizing that we have to be diverse and to be diverse we have to include, we have to do the work to make people included. Well, I'll throw this out to the panel generally. What should that diversity look like? What are the contours of that diversity as we came to see it? Well, I'll put it down unless you want to go ahead. And I'm going to respond not as a lead organizer speaking for my team, but really just as a member of the community. And I think for me, to what Tracy was talking about in her keynote, Tracy Lovak was speaking in keynote, it's about normalizing. And for me, it's about treating people as people regardless of anything that separates them or makes them different from me and for you or anybody else in this room. And as such a global community that WordPress is, it's really not possible for us as individuals to be aware of every cultural bias that we might have or not even be aware of. And I think if we can build a system, and this is someone you've utopianized, but if we can build a system that really is just based on human dignity and respect, then diversity will happen because it's just, oh, there's a human being. Let's come and be a part of the community. I'm going to throw a couple things out because I'm not, I'm a real outsider. To me, I'll say he is. I learned a little about him from Liam from Andrea from reading the website. But lawyers like words and like to play with sort of where this fits. So among the things I've heard, some words that jumped out to me are, I mean, inclusive and diverse are different. They feed each other. We want a diverse community. The more diverse this community is, by nature, what you do. The more diverse it is, the better functioning it's going to be. And I liked that piece that when Andrea explained it, she said, we don't value inclusiveness. It's not just an ideal because it's the right thing. It's also doing well by doing good. It helps this community. Inclusion, and we tend to use inclusion in two ways. Inclusion, like we want you to join the club. But inclusion is you participate. You are not just part of the club, but you actually can influence it, engage in the direction and the shape and the contours. And I think we're going to get to a little bit of that in a minute. But the other piece that struck me as, especially as Liam and Andrea were speaking, is sort of how we're defining, and Liam, you said something. We want to find the human to see, you know, to see human dignity and the more humans we have, the better it is. But trying to think about the difference between values, opinions, and action, you know, and how we start when we, when you, I'm calling myself a part of you today. Maybe forever. When we start thinking about how we're drawing lines, and that's what we're going to be about. That's what we're going to have to talk about. When you start talking about drawing lines, are you drawing lines at opinion? And I'm going to add to that belief. I may believe something. You may believe something different. We may be able to have a conversation about that belief. But at what point does that belief become an opinion? At what point does that belief belive certain values? At what point does that belief cause action? And it seems to me action, we talked a little on our preparation phone call about, you know, kind of, it's easy to identify the Nazi party. That's easy. It's easy to put on the other end of the spectrum, you know, cute little polar bears or lambs. You know, that's easy. We like polar bears and lambs. We don't like the Nazi party. It's what's in the middle here. And in addition to what's in the middle here, it's are we talking about, I have a firmly and sincerely held belief. I'm not acting on it. I'm not trying to kill you or exclude you. But I honestly believe X. So I think that's something, as we talk about identifying and getting beyond that, we know it when we see it. You know, it's going to be key to how we start the conversation. One thing I think of around kind of what you're talking about, but also like how do we define the diversity that we want? This is the community to build around software. And so it started as a software project and it has this core value of democrat or goal of democratizing publishing. And by using the GPL license, which has freedoms to allow you basically to get the code for free for zero dollars, but also to do anything you want with it. It's available everywhere. And so if you're in a third world country, as long as you have the bandwidth, you can download it and there's no restrictions on where you can host it. It uses technologies like PHP and it's meant to be installed in two minutes. And so from the technology standpoint, people in their bedrooms all across the world were able to create websites and blog on top of WordPress. And so I think the goal for the work camps is that same diversity of anyone who can get to it is there, should also be represented when we meet up in person. And so I think the code of conduct around the work camps is probably the most, you know, written out, spelled out regulations and rules that we have around how we treat each other. But yeah, it still goes back to the code and how people interact with the software too. I think that raises a pretty interesting point. So in that description, you're talking about there being a normative thrust to how we go about doing this, right? Now, you know, Dars and I are much more in the camp of there's got to be a rule and something on paper that says you can or you cannot do X and it's got to have, you know, real... Notice and... Right, notice and opportunity to be heard and all these other things and I was paying attention in class. So WordPress, as I understand it, though, doesn't have that formalized structure. So how do we get from what you're talking about to two questions? One, how do we get from what you're talking about to something that is more formalized? And two, is that really the way to go? Yeah. Carefully, if ever. Sorry. Oh, no, I think like an example that is a good illustration of that is recently over the past year, a lot of sites would be platforming Alex Jones' website and videos and things like that. And they would just do it and they're like, oh, we're in the terms of services and say that Alex Jones can't be hosted under platform and they can, you know, some companies, you know, think care, they just do it. They have like, actually, my website too is a customer, I have a line that says like, I can fire you for any reason. And hopefully I don't have to like hire one of you to prevent me for that. What do we do? D-W-D-U-A-M. So famous sites like WordPress.com hosted, not Alex Jones himself, but other like what they call like Sandy Hook Denier websites and things like that. And I remember thinking like, I don't know like what line they can put in terms of service to like, I think it's okay. Like the goal is like, I don't want Nazis on my platform. I don't want Nazis using my software or I don't want specifically Alex Jones. Like, I think it's okay that there's a human element making that decision. And if they make the wrong decision for some reason, the community will be like, you know, we'll fight back and say actually like most of us, this guy's okay or enough of us do. So I think it starts with that motivation like, let's get rid of Alex Jones. And I thought that WordPress.com had like a clever out in their terms of service. So it started with like, we want to specifically target this platform, these specific sites. And then the line that came up in the terms of service was in the private information section. So you can't host on their platform the malicious publication of unauthorized identifying images of minors. So I think it was okay. It was smart. It was really smart. But what you meant to say was no Nazis, no Sandy Hook deniers, no. And you said, oh, we can use this privacy thing, this copyright. And I remember thinking when we had this conversation on the phone, really smart. So this is a thing. I'm going to break in here because I love that Doris called out the actions, values and opinions because within the WordPress community, we and open source in general, I think we have this tension between like filing the bug on the behavior versus the person, right? We generally within the project, we don't say you're a bad person because you documented your code badly. You did a bad thing because you documented your code badly, right? And for my perspective when we take that into an ethical space, where we extrapolate that to is you can have whatever opinions you want as long as you don't act in ways that conflict with our values, right? And I see that kind of playing out in a lot of, and that's how we kind of try to maintain a collaborative relationship in a literally global project where we all have in many cases very diverging opinions about lots of things that separate us. But what we do value, what brings us together is the end goal of making WordPress better. And then if people's actions conflict with the work, conflict with those values, then that gets called out and that gets corrected. And the way that that particular terms of service thing was handled is a great example of that because it's not calling out, we reject this kind of person, but we reject this kind of action, you know? And I see this in technology all the time and it's an interesting way to approach it. What I find particularly interesting is how in other areas it can be seen as a conflict. No, we're talking about what we want to define as the kind of people, right? Not the actions of those people. And that's a question that I think, you know, I don't know if that needs to change or not. So I want to go back to the original question of how do we start to address this, right? How do we as a community? And I would very much echo that it has to be on actions, right? Because we can't possibly, I'll say, legislate for every belief system and have any kind of community, right? But actions can. And we can vehemently disagree with each other in our head and still have a respectful conversation about why you're wrong and why I'm right or vice versa. And so I think that's where if we aim for that as a community and then take the kinds of systems that we have like code of conduct for work games. How do we interact with each other when we're in the same physical space? Then we can start to have conversations like we're having today of how do we actually move this behemoth of a conversation forward? But it's actually a really, really important conversation and it's not just important for WordPress. We see it ethics and technology all the time, right? We had Cambridge Analytica and Facebook and we had Volkswagen and the emissions test and we have Google and their Maps app. And I think it's just that time in history, right? A hundred years ago they didn't have ethics conversation around the internet because it didn't exist. And I imagine if you go back far enough they didn't have ethics conversations around international sailing and shipping because they didn't sail and ship international. So we're at this point now. We have this new system, this new tool, this new mechanism that while our ethics haven't necessarily changed, we have to figure out how to apply them to this new system. And my vision is let's keep having these kinds of conversations in person. Online can help but those can also spend on a control pretty easily. But in person follow our code of conduct and work towards some kind of action-based consensus. Does that speak then to a need for, again, certainly Beth, I guess, where the question started. Does that speak to a need for some kind of structure at the top? Some sort of layer of institutionalization to happen so that this is less of a, well, the conversation happens here and the conversation happens here and it sort of bubbles up from the bottom. Or is that fine? Do we eschew having this top-down approach and just sort of let the conversations come up from the grassroots? One of the things that, and again, I can't help it, I'm a lawyer. Mostly I like it. There's this part of me that, and I said this to Lee and Leigh. I hate to, I don't know anything about philosophy because, you know, I'm a lawyer. But, you know, there's a sort of victimistic notion of family, you know, that I may not be able to tell you today, here's the definition of our values and what we mean by inclusive and what we mean by somebody. And it's, and I'm going to come back to Sandy Hook in action in a minute. But, you know, I may not be able to tell you exactly what it looks like with the definition, one, two, three, four. Lawyers like that. We like to be able to say one, two, three, four because you should have noticed that if you do this, you're out of the club, so you know to do it or not do it. But I think to go back to Lee's word, this is a behemoth of an understanding. It's also something that's changing and evolving so quickly that maybe the best we can do is say, not quite I know it when I see it because that lets a couple of people kind of, you know, in that particular instance is I know obscenity when I see it and I'm an old privileged white man and I know obscenity when I see it. I'm not loving that. But the idea of being able to say, as we see, as things bubble up, we have a problem with Holy Cow, and our gold platinum sponsors is hosting a Nazi website. We're concerned about that. Somebody comes in and says, I've got a concern because I've noticed something else. We have the conversation. We decide is it in, is it out. I think that's kind of the only way it's going to happen, especially if you don't want some kind of top-down legislation. But it does kind of push against the idea of knowing how you're supposed to behave and who's in and who's out. And I think about someone like Jason who's happily doing what he does. He's happily doing that and going along and he's got this big list of customers and everybody's fine and all of a sudden he finds out that his biggest customer is banned, or should be banned, or the group has decided. And that's, I think, the question of how do we decide and who's part of the conversation about how do we decide? I'll say questions at the end, but there's a lot of them. I'm happy to be flexible. Okay, thank you. Have a small heart attack. Okay, which I think is a great way to transition into getting into the meat of what those decisions are. What the boundaries are, who should be in, who should be out. So I'm just going to throw it out there. I mean, who should be in? Where are the boundaries on what's acceptable, who should be in the game versus outside the game looking in? What does that decision look like? Well, and so what's fascinating about the case that came up, that kind of prompted this whole discussion in the first place, is that the question that the Word Camp Philly team asked the global community team is, do we have a boundary that affects for, you know, what sponsors we accept or don't accept that relates to what, who they do business with, right? And do we have, and then, I mean, I, because I oversee a global program, then immediately translated that to, do we have a boundary for who speakers do business with? Do we have a boundary for who organizers do business with? Like, do we have a boundary that says if you do business with X kind of people slash with people who do X kind of actions, do, is that a line that we want to draw that says you're doing business with these, with this group, means that you cannot help our project move forward in its values, right? And no one, to my knowledge, has ever asked that in the community team. And I think it's an excellent question. And I'm here to tell you, I don't think anyone has an answer yet. But in 20 minutes we'll finish. But I, you know, I think it is really interesting, and we had an open conversation about this on the global community team's P2, because when you are in the business of writing software to make blogs, the way that you build it is also to use blogs. And it was, I think, the most popular conversation that we've had in our, on the entire site forever, well, so far. And it really got people talking. And I appreciate that we're exploring this space, you know? I'm not sure I know the answer yet. I think, like, I see all these questions in three areas, like an easier one that we talked about a bit is kind of protecting the work camp, in terms so we set up these regulations to say, you know, if people are hateful openly after wearing a Nazi badge, it's going to make people uncomfortable, it's going to hinder the work camp, so it's easy to say, like, to take action and kick those people out. And then there's also, like, a history of wordpress from a technology standpoint, and also at work camps, like, taking, like, a stance, like, they take a stance on the GPL, that it wasn't, like, open and shut. I don't think it's been officially tested, this notion that if you have a plug-in on wordpress, you have to adopt the same license that wordpress does. It was a gray area, I think, because Matt Mullenweg and wordpress in, like, 2011 or so took a very strong stance that if you're going to speak at a work camp, you have to, if you try to sell plug-ins under a different license, like, you can't speak. And that was them kind of pushing their weight to force change in the industry. So they've done that on the technology standpoint. Sometimes they adopt, like, a framework, and they say, all right, a third of the web is going to use this now. But sometimes they do it, yeah, like, around more social issues, like, licensing issues, and then I think maybe they want to do it around social issues as well, saying, you know, we disagree with hate, and, like, what could we do to affect change outside the bubble? So, like, it's easy to, like, protect the bubble. I think it's more, like, just straightforward, like, hey, I'm protecting, you know, the people here, but then it's like, are we pushing, are we trying to affect change outside of wordpress as well? And then there's kind of a middle ground, which I think is the case with DreamHouse, it's like, maybe I'm not trying to, like, change DreamHouse, but I just don't want to be associated with them. That's kind of a very loose way to change that and say, like, well, you know, I'm shunning you. So there could be more active ways that we, you know, penalize or shun or try to enforce change, but shunning is a start in that direction. And I was the dream, and I'm old enough to remember when the problem of the Internet, you know, Reed left, but I'm only glancing at you. When spam was the thing, because there was limited amount of space, and so when the Internet, when Aldo weren't in the Internet. You know, the idea was, this was democratizing, and we said this earlier, democratizing information. It was going to be wonderful and universal, and there is no sovereign, and again, that makes us a little nervous, no sovereign who's in charge, but jurisdiction. There was no sovereign, and it would be the community, and it would be community norms. And the idea was, if you spammed, we would shun you. And it kind of worked, and it kind of didn't work, and the RTC didn't have to get involved. And, you know, it's struggling with how something is giant, and you say globalization. I mean, if you think, and as I'm sitting here thinking about that globalized universe of values that we might take, even though in the United States we have such diversity of core values, but the values that we accept would be completely, not just we don't respect those values, but our values in this other country culture universe are diametrically opposed. Our value is not just our value is not your value, our value is not your value. Our value is opposite of your value. How do you navigate that? How do you decide what those things are? That was a big part of the conversation that we brought to Andrea, and her team was, as local organizers, where does our authority and capacity, as community organizers, not as the boss of the local community, but we're out there schlepping doing the work. Where can we say this doesn't fit with our local community versus the global sense community? And I think that's a challenge that as a wider community we have to figure out and globalization is wonderful in so many levels, but it also adds a lot more moving pieces to Doris's point, that which is great here, rah, rah, rah, it could be diametrically opposed. And even if we take an action-based assessment system, the actions might be so opposite. And all of this then gets convoluted with sponsorship, right? Because if it was, you're just paying for your WordPress WordCamp locally and you go out and find local businesses to support that, there's a lot more control, but it gets complicated at best at a wider level. I think one thing that both developers and lawyers probably have in common is that we can tend to focus on the edge cases. They're super interesting to us, and that's where we spend a lot of time as developers figuring things out. But I think in these social issues as well, we can get caught trying to, how do we narrow down the edge cases around keeping out people from our community? But I would hope that that doesn't paralyze us from actually taking action. And so one of the reasons I pointed to the terms of service on the WordPress.com is that we have this still, here's a phrase that 99% of us can agree with, let's get this out of the way and enforce that now and kind of move on. And I think we should embrace the gray area of decisions and the edge case decisions as this is how we're going to work things out. And it is going to be different from its global community. And so something as simple as fashion here could be illegal in other countries. But if you narrow it down to, what's the common values that we want people to feel safe here? So the garb that we wear in Philadelphia to feel safe is different from the garb that's worn in like a Muslim country to feel safe. And yeah, there's ways for the local organizers to have leeway to figure that out for themselves. It's probably a good thing. And as we sort of embark on this enterprise and trying to figure out what the values are, is there a risk, and I know you mentioned this in the prep materials, the false consensus developing around whatever collection of ideas you decide are the right ideas. Is that a risk? How big a risk is it? And does it potentially narrow the scope of discourse in a way that's problematic? Yes. All of that. In a word. Yes. Okay, we're done. I mean, in many ways, while people who come from a space where things are better when they're settled, like law, our project seems probably irresponsibly chaotic. And that's by design. It's, you know, I think, and I underline the fact that that's by design. Like the open source methodology tells us that we need the chaos. We need the clamor. We need the free flowing, sometimes disagreeing, open bazaar of conversation and contribution to make the whole crazy magic happen. And so in a very real way, we are creating our own culture. We are creating our own community of Bowman's Neo tribe, you know, if you will, and defining what works inside WordPress. And that then hopefully transcends cultural differences where we take WordPress, you know, and in a very real way, I mean, administering a global program that focuses on in-person events where we say, here are your values. Here is the code of conduct. It may not match the code of conduct or other events in your country or events where you prefer to go. But this is what, as an organizer, you are expected to achieve because this is the WordPress culture. This is the WordPress set of behavioral norms and expectations. And our organizers are asked specifically, set these behavioral norms. And these behavioral norms then create a better project and a better product because the grace, courtesy, respect, and inclusivity that we create in our events are the opening of the pipeline that then translates and makes WordPress literally more functional because people are expected. It's harder to be nice on the internet, but if you start out extra nice at an event, it's easier to be nice on the internet, right? But yeah, we are creating a new culture. And I'd like to throw just a couple, because I think, I think you're right, having, I think having the conversation, and that gets kind of that bit Palestinian thing, having the conversation, you're teasing out. I always think of it, and actually lawyers do like certain tea, but law professors don't. And we tell our students, right, the thing you have to be uncomfortable with is being comfortable with it. The engineers struggle in law school because it's like, but there has to be affordable. How much rebar and how much concrete? That's always the answer, of course. But I'd like to throw out, because I think making sure this conversation can happen and not letting things that can derail it derail it. So let me throw out, I don't know whether to call them false dichotomies or red herrings or whatever. But one of the things that should jump up, and you can see on a t-shirt, you know, there was an old bumper sticker during the Vietnam War that said, going to war for peace is like effing for virginity. And maintaining inclusivity by excluding is like, and that is, I think, a false dichotomy. And the reason I think it is, and this gets to sort of understanding, me trying to come to this understanding, there's this idea that the internet is this monolithic, it's the internet. It is kind of. And we have this idea that it would be this global, democratized, with a universe where everybody was contributing and everybody could take from it. It is going to balkanize. It will. I mean, right now, here's what's going to happen soon. China has certain rules. The US has other rules. The EU is going to have certain rules. I don't know. I think we're going to work things out with the EU. I think China's rules for the internet are going to mean that there's going to end up being a separate internet in China, maybe elsewhere. Nonetheless, and this is what I had to kind of wrap my brain around, is, you know, after Liam asked me to do this, because I do have this First Amendment, and you are not bound by the First Amendment because you're private actors, blah, blah, blah, but we have this commitment to First Amendment values. There's enough space on the internet that if dream host says, Nazis, find yourself another place to host your website. There's enough space on the internet, at least right now, for people to find those spaces, and I think there will always be that, at least in the near future. So I struggled. I had to get myself to the point where I could say, we are being inclusive by being exclusive. And I think that comes back to, and I think this may be the most important thing you can do going forward, is truly defining those core values, and making them clear, and understanding that they're going to be a little bit fluid, but truly defining where you're planting your feet. When you decide where you plant your feet, you can do a lot of things up here, and you can edit that and move it around. You decide where you plant your feet, and don't let yourself get shaken off of that. The only caution I would have, and that goes to the Opinions, Values, Action thing, is sometimes you have to listen. And I told Andrea's story that I'm a Cramarian, like I'm a bird, you know. It's not more important, Lee. It's more important. It's an adjective. It's not an adverb, you know. I get tangled. I'll write an ink on those papers. It's terrifying. That said, I had a conversation with one of a prominent student of mine, you know, and I had marked, you know, the singular and the seed with the plural pronoun. Can't do that! The student, they, no, no, it's one student. Can't have they. And she explained, you know, gender fluidity, and we don't have a good word, so we're compromising, and they is a compromise. Hard for me. But I'm there on that. I'm there on that. I no longer mark the day after a singular and a seed. You need to listen to those other voices to be able to take those core values that you've got your feet planted firmly on, listen to those other voices that you may be thinking, I was thinking my core value, which is communication and accurate communication, making someone hear a sheet who's not a hear a sheet is not accurate communication. That's how you hear this stuff. So that's going to be your struggle, is how you inform this in a way that is consistent with what you said. Free flow of information, an open bazaar. We call it in the First Amendment, the Emersonian version, and the Michal Jonian version of the First Amendment, is the marketplace of ideas. And that's the internet, folks. So the false positives, I think, are, you know, I think the communication is key to that. And, you know, our word camp code of conduct is very much treat people with respect while you're in front of them. You're whispering under their backs. If nobody sees, does it happen? But, and now I'm going to tell you a little bit, just speak as the lead organizer of word camp Philly again, is that as this situation was evolving in August, I had the opportunity to speak with everybody on my team independently about this, and sometimes it was slacking back and forth and sometimes it was video calls. But on at least a couple of instances, I had conversations where my team members were saying, what if this wasn't the Nazis? What if it was something that just discriminated against people of color, or just discriminated against women, or just discriminated against young people, old people? Take a smaller, the Nazis are easy, they hate everybody. So it's sort of, okay. But what happens then, and does our community have the communication skills? Are we working hard enough to remove our own cultural biases? It's because, you know, where we grew up, it doesn't mean that we're bad people. We had experiences, things, certain ways, even if we're accepting, we have a focus, right? It's how we get through life, it's how we cross the street, we focus on the cars coming, and we ignore the other stuff, and it happens. So I think the false positives come when we don't listen. We're not willing to change our language because of, well, this is the way it works, or we're not willing to let somebody else up to the table, not just into the room, but to sit at the table and hear their views and spend the time to think about, that's a perspective I've never even thought of before. That's a really foreign concept to me. But let me start to think about it, let me have that conversation. So I think that's the risk, if we don't have conversations, if we don't meet in person, much harder to be rude to somebody in real life than it's on the internet, then we can start to hear those voices and hear those stories and think about those perspectives and see the humanity in that and ultimately see ourselves in that situation in some shape or form that will enable, that is a really valid point. We need to think about how to address that. All right, so that actually prompts a question that we discussed on the call and you and I discussed, which is, obviously there is an affirmative desire to be inclusive and have an open community and push for all those things. Has WordPress done, has a community? You know, sort of done everything it needs to do to be inclusive on the full range of things that make people diverse. So are we as, are we pushing for diversity and inclusion on things like gender and sexuality as much as or as hard as we are on issues of race or socioeconomic standing? Because there's a verse in the Bible that I'm going to butcher as we speak that goes something like, how can you see to pluck the moat from your brother's eye for the beam in your arm? And so is the community doing enough on sort of a full battery of issues, a full range of identifications inside the house to be able to then have these conversations or take action on things like people sponsoring the Nazis and stuff like that? Probably not. Yeah, got it. My first thought would be, I don't know that we can answer that. That's kind of like the open question. We need to make sure that people who do feel that way, I only have my own perspective. And we can talk to some cases, there's been very clear action to have more women speaking, more women attending and when there's 50-50 women at a work camp, sponsors will commend that. And I've seen less around race, besides on things like this panel and yet trying to have a good mix on panels and things, but definitely not the same effort. But what I was going to say is that we just need to make sure that that conversation is embraced when it comes up. And then those voices, because problems by definition are smaller, can be amplified the way that they need to be to reach us and reach the people in power. Andrew, you had a very historical reaction to that in terms of... We're not doing enough. What do you think? Yeah, I mean, well, for one thing, I would hope that everyone in this room and everyone who participates in the WordPress project would ask themselves that question every day. Like, am I doing enough to address my own unconscious bias? Am I doing enough to be an ally if I have privilege in a certain area? Am I doing enough to question whether I have gone outside of my spaces? Because I know that at least the global community team has conversations with organizers every single time we orient a new organizer talking about the importance of diversity and inclusion. And I know how much variation I see in the actual execution of the work that we encourage organizers to do. And I see how much homogeneity we have in our project right now. So if I were going to judge us on actions, I would say we are not doing enough. If I were to say have we made progress as far as opinions and interests, I think we have made progress over time. But are we doing everything we could? I don't think we are. And I think in that respect, and again, it's how, and this is less how we define these values and things, but how we act it. There's that passive of course you're welcome, of course you're welcome, of course you're welcome. But then there's the active, the world of promoting leadership and things like that. There's mentors, sponsors, and champions. And I know in talking to my own husband, who's a wonderful, open, terrific, lovely person, who not at all kind of a, any of the bad things that would violate your values, right? All good, all good, good guys. And he said to me once about ten or twelve years ago, he said, I didn't even realize I was doing this. He's this tall, good-looking Irish boy. And he said, I didn't even realize I was doing it. Because if you asked me, should a woman, should an African-American, should a transgender person become a partner, I would say, of course. But when I looked around the room for the person I would chat with and talk about like, hey, this is a good way to mentor and eventually sponsor and eventually champion, I looked around and I was drawn to the people who looked like me. I was drawn to those blue-eyed, tall, athletic Irish boys. He consciously made that decision and now one of his favorite, number two, is a woman who's about a four-foot-eight, you know, terrific litigator. But it was that conscious realization that I am not saying, oh no, I'm not going to mentor you. It's just when I think about who I'm going to mentor, I'm going to be drawn to you because you look like me, you feel like me. So it's being conscious and aware of how we as a group are saying not just, sure we'll let you in, but how we say, no, I want you in how then I identify and I look around this room and I say, we need more people that look like you in this room and how do we find those people and let them know that there is such a thing as word camp. A bug fix for the Wittgensteinian recognition, right, to make it focus on values rather than appearance or other. But how do we get more diversity? How do we get diversity of opinion too? How do we invite if opinion is like, oh, don't talk to them because they don't want to hear anything you have to say about X. How do we make sure that you are hearing, that we are hearing what we need to hear in order to make those larger decisions about where we're drawing lines? Yeah, I just wanted to answer the question, are we doing enough? And I think it's absolutely not. And I think part of that is just the very nature of the human condition. These are massive challenging problems and could we be more welcoming? Is being welcoming hard? Yes, because we're always having to question our own assumptions, our own values, our own morals and we can't just let's just do it the way we always do because we always have to. So it takes time and energy and it's hard. I also think that getting at are we being as inclusive in all sorts of different ways, these are issues that are much bigger than word press, racism, socio-economic depravity. But these are not things that, if the word press project goes great, racism is not going to go away. So we have to kind of see it in the context. But I think to Andrea's point earlier about if we can create a system through the global program of rolling out word camps and here's how when you're on a word camp, you treat people, you deal with people, you engage with people, you support people, then we can impose an opportunity to be able to have conversations not just within our word press community but beyond around how are we addressing racism, how are we addressing socio-economic disparity, how are we trying to tackle these things and not every word camp has to turn into how we're going to fix every problem in the world. But if our mindset is how can we do more? Inevitably, we're going to do more. To that point and I want to link it back to something you said earlier about the difference between diversity and inclusion. The legal profession is I believe still the least diverse profession writ large in America. There are all sorts of efforts underway to get more people who look more like America in law firms, particularly big law firms. And a lot of firms are doing a fairly good job of trying to turn the corner in terms of getting more faces in the room, right? But then that gets to the divide between diversity and inclusion. Because someone said to me and I hope I'm not getting this wrong too diversity is being invited to the party. Inclusion is being invited to dance at the party. And so I guess the threshold of consideration is are we getting more people involved in this process? Are we taking down barriers and letting more people into the word camps and the structure of the community? That kind of thing. But what else can we do and what else needs to be done in the couple minutes we have left to make sure that when people get here that look more like the rest of America they get to dance while they're at the party? I have a practical answer to that if I can. I like that. I've been organizing a meetup in Philly for about six and a half years now. And one of the things that I've learned is no one will come to our meetup if we invite them if we're not prepared to go to their meetup first. It's kind of the parenting. No, my kids not come over to play at your house until we see your house and make sure that you're safe. So I try to make a point to going to their house. I don't have to go over 18 different times but I go to the different meetups to try to meet people and show them that our community wants to be a part of their community and vice versa. And in a practical sense that's proven very, very helpful. There's more time, not more energy but it's absolutely helped. There's more to be done but that's a practical stuff that's worked well. And I think word camp Philly is a great example of how an event that shows in its actions that it is thinking about people that are not necessarily part of the dominant culture. I mean we have the pronoun pins, the talk to me, yeah the color communication stickers. I mean there's a lot of ways that you can effectively communicate to people we're thinking about lots of different ways that you can feel welcome. Having food that everyone can eat is an incredibly powerful way to say you are literally welcome at the table. There is something for you here and food is a huge connector there for creating that sense of I belong. If you share food with someone you're not in danger. It's a very visceral way to create community. And so yeah there are a lot of things that we endorse in the word camp program that have a very specific inclusion goal. Because not only do we want people to come but then we also want them to feel safe. And by feeling safe that's how you create that sense of belonging. It's such a cliche. It's leading by example. It's how I act. It's I act in this way toward X and Y can say well she acts in this way toward X that she'll act in that way toward me and I'll feel welcome. So I do think and that's why I said this false dichotomy of inclusion and non-inclusion the idea that we have to define everything actually lawyers don't define everything there's a lot of this is what the statute says but what do we mean by reasonable what do we mean by? So this I think it is how you act and I think your example of food I'm Italian so food is key whenever you want Senator Mitchell who was responsible for bringing whatever level to peace to the Irish troubles there is one of the things he did was these people who hated each other who were literally blowing each other up he made them eat together on Thursday nights every Thursday night the Protestants at the Catholics Northern Ireland they would come together they would sit at the table and they would soccer game Saturday you can play soccer and I can play soccer it's that food as the place where I can feel you're right if I can eat your food then I've got to feel relatively safe how we act will deliver the message and that will help us define well I think that takes us right about to the end if everybody could join me giving a round of applause to the panel on top of this we are around for questions for a while so I mean feel free to start shouting them out we'll go from there yes on the subject of rules I think that part of a rule is that you have to enforce it or it also monitors such police police force and so that the situation that happened here was brought to the attention of people involved and so there's an intentionality there if you're told that you're doing something wrong and you weren't aware of it so WordPress is a third of the internet and I'm sure there are many many websites that use WordPress that are hosted by hosting companies that we all use that are doing things that are not what we think that may be our hate oriented just as much as this one not seems like there are also people involved in our community right we had a situation where one of our speakers was brought to our attention years ago had been accused of a crime that was on a sex offender list and so how do you handle you mentioned speakers as well how do you handle that and if they speak and then later it's brought to your attention if they move this way or whether it's beforehand you can cancel them how do you approach these things or if they since recovered you've got members in society how do you welcome them in and include people who have a history that maybe yes is controversial so I'm adding more to the fire here but I guess my basic question is who's responsible for policing this the rule that when it's brought to your attention if it crosses this line or that line and how is that who brings it to your attention and I think critical in that I think there's two critical pieces in what you said probably the most important is it's one thing if we say to dream host get rid of the Nazis or we'll grudgingly give up your money it's another thing if we say she was a sex offender 40 years ago we don't tell you but suddenly you're not invited to the table you don't know why you don't even know you're not invited to the table and you completely be formed and you'd like to say but but you know wasn't that a way so transparency is such a cliche but transparency the ability to be able to say this is why I think that's why you know at first when Liam said we want to tease out why this panel is here it's because of the concern we have with dream host my first reaction is really want to do that to your sponsor that's exactly what you want to do because that's exactly how you give people notice and you give people a chance to say yeah but that's not on different boards 20 years on form I'm rehabilitated I've changed that opinion the other interesting this is a question we raised or at least I raised you have to be so very careful of not deputizing some sort of force that's going around looking for that's a very good point I think I raised this in the prep call but on twitter there's this repeated phenomenon that you know I'll leave it to these people to say whether whether it's good or bad but of something happens in restaurant or store acts that is patently offensive that is you know wrong and and is hurtful or hateful to person why someone records that they put that on twitter and they say twitter this horrible thing just happened this person is bad I want you to find out where this person works I want you to find out what this person's name is let's make this person famous this person should lose their job right and now you're deputizing everyone on twitter that has seen this account that has looked at this tweet to then take this action and remove this person from their livelihood is that so this gets to your question what's the proper boundary for the kind of police that should go on in this community around whether people should be in or out and that's that lawyers always use that phrase notice an opportunity to be heard you know you get a complaint you've been you hit my car I want money and you have a chance to come in and say I did not hit your car right I can tell you how we currently do it currently we ask everyone who participates in a leadership position in the word press in a word press event at least to opt in to our clearly stated set of expectations for word camp organizers speakers sponsors and volunteers to be very clear there is no transgression as far as our current standards for sponsors or anyone happening with dream hosts customer base we don't have a rule addressing who people do business with as a barrier for participating in at this level in our community it's not so from a completely like the rules perspective dream host has done nothing wrong they are completely with our program if we found out the sponsor or speaker after the fact was either disingenuous or did not understand what they said they agree to which does happen we employ a calling in approach rather than a calling out approach we say we go to that person we say hey so it looks like we have a misunderstanding because you agree to this and this is what we see and those don't match let's talk about how we can resolve this because until we resolve it you can't be a speaker you can't be a sponsor you can't be an organizer that's word camps and meet-ups okay I want to you mentioned the thing about the lawyers love words or language and you also said that you were Ramarian now raise you one because I'm first I'm a linguist lawyers you gotta shit out they're trying to codify something that is generally accepted or whatever but it doesn't work that way in my world all you have are shades of gray and it takes language to give you any sort of black and white and that's always negotiable but when I was thinking about this specific question related here to dream host it's a different sort of question than the one sex offender because that's an individual we're talking about a corporate entity and more importantly it's nothing exactly you did it's the more important thing without the language how do we cover that from a linguistic perspective how you cover that is because I'm giving you what I think or what I feel so I'm addressing my perspective on it and my thought the verb more importantly I think that when you have a company we're saying we're not going to take your money what grounds does a work camp organizer have to stand on that because Liam doesn't represent word press really and that's the question that I think he does I would like that to be discussed a little bit about how he does I'm not saying he doesn't I just wanted to make that clear process is important specifically the reason we have an organizer agreement the section in our handbook that lists our expectations for word camp organizers, sponsors, speakers and volunteers is titled representing word press because to the vast majority of the attendees of our events meetups and word camps the people who are making this thing happen are word press and so the reason we have formalized rules and expectations for those people and for the way that they act in our community and sometimes outside it is because they represent word press, the project and the brand in the world and so we have some formalized standards for the way they act and interact yeah just to reinforce that earlier today I was asked for how long have I worked for word camp? yes how much are they paying? how much are they paying? some of it may be covered but number one some said historically in the United States we are going through one of these periods where there are extraordinary divisions and the last two I can think of Civil War and the possibly the 60s a lot of people in the 1930s there was a very large Nazi movement pro-Nazi movement in the United States there was a German American in the 1930s that tried to organize pro-Nazi rallies and so forth it didn't get as far as it might have although it got pretty damn far and there was a radio about the coffin we used to broadcast these out-and-out Nazi racist and I don't know the distinction between free speech meaning what the government can regulate and the open web what came out so the historical this is we're doing it again the second thing is from my point of view it's always seemed quite reasonable that if a host and many hosting companies can put a clause in their terms no pornography and everybody is this picture pornographic? not quite but it's one of those fuzzy things that and I think that was the judge that said but it would be perfectly possible to put clauses in contracts in terms of service and so forth that said no hate groups or no groups that advocate point point point perfect the language but it would be possible to exclude something that was hateful in a way you could exclude something that is pornographic without it excluding people there are people that I absolutely disagree with 100% politically but I don't consider them they're not hate groups they're not really business groups whereas the hate groups I'm not too business with it would be possible it's the foundation to put such clauses and therefore for WCS to put into its terms contracts with its sponsors look you know you want to do business with Nazis that's fine but we don't want to do business with you and you know just as there are companies that specialize in hosting adult content there might be companies that specialize in hosting the Nazis the Klan and so forth the other point I want to make is that it may not be as obvious to white people or to certain white people that while the Nazi party is perhaps not as it's growing but it's kind of Charlottesville is a relatively new phenomenon the Klan has never been a phenomenon anywhere near the American community it's every single day it isn't literally the KKK it's some spinoff and some local white people's counsel so this is immediately on fire this is a really big issue and it will bite us in the tail and I say us meeting as a part of the word oppressed community I think it will bite us in the tail if we do not oppress it in a fair and specific way I completely appreciate the lawyerly approach and the definition so you can say this is this this is not that because otherwise it's all just somebody's opinion I think that's possible to do and worth working with and the very reason for this panel was because of a specific example of it but we all know there are many other under the radar examples and I don't want to single out a theme publisher a security company a designer and that actually partens back to the example that you gave during the call Liam about okay so I was really saying the Nazis are easy that one we can agree on KKK still easy I think look outside seamstress is sewing up the road outside the door here finishes up, takes the money, comes inside wants to join the party what do we do about that? you don't worry about it it's a gray area it's something that's going to get mediaed out on that specific case it's not something that's going to be global we don't have to have a seamstress clause exactly along those lines doing business as a library that has a copy of mine confident to be considered promoting Naziism would a lawyer that is a court-designed defense council for Richard Spencer be considered promoting Naziism or even someone who represents them voluntarily would a journalism organization that Francisco from Milo that's what his name is that is his last name cool is that promoting hate what is doing business I'm sorry there's so many people I've got a chance to talk do we have a response to that? I think those are all very very valid questions and those are questions that as a community we need to start to think about and try to articulate because yes it really comes down to how long is the change because if somebody shows up in a grand marshal or grand whatever it is outfit and says here's my $20 I'm going to come in no you're not actually but if they do the business right outside and it's glass windows and we see it can they come in so it's just really just where is the chain how many links do we accept and I don't think we're going to come to an immediate agreement certainly not now but I think these are the conversations we need to have but I can say what our current line is yeah sure and currently the line is endorsement rather than commerce well but dream host dream host endorse and we said we need you to step back from this right because dream host dream host didn't endorse the nonsense they just provided a platform I hate you because your library example is probably the worst example the most troubling example because what I said before you came in is there's lots of the internet there's lots of places in the internet WordPress has a third so there's two thirds if you can do it but a library by definition is a place where you should be able to get every opinion and see every book and librarians by the way librarians are the heroes librarians are the ones that will say you cannot look at his and they're the ones who put the sign up that said by the way the NSA can ask us for your browser history and I know this is off topic but I love librarians the most heroic thing some librarians did is they put up the sign that said the NSA can ask us for your browsing history they haven't asked us yet when they haven't asked us yet disappears you know they've asked they're not allowed to tell but anyway there's a bit of a legal gray areas currently because there isn't a lot of case law surrounding the question of where hosts lie in the side of providing a space endorsement are they publishers are they utility are they libraries and so we don't we have one piece of case law related to pornography that then we're using to extrapolate for everything and from what I can gather everyone's like don't send this to the courts yet because they don't understand the computers and so people are kind of piecing their way through it with no reliable legal foundation and it's really messy true I don't know if it's a question of trying to get clarification but with that you can take the library analogy it's it's not so much and if you try to put it with dream host it's not so much that dream host has a copy of a live com on their servers it's that there's a line between having information about say what not to use value and then also having a platform where they're using it to increase and have actual content so if you have a joined Nazis party you're making an action that's trying to spread that belief but if there were just like the history of an American Nazi party it's a little different that's like an excellent point because one of the things you said was like how do we define doing business with and that would be point A and how do we differentiate between someone who's just hosting content first doing business or supporting or endorsing if the library had a hate group for the booth in the library it's a little different than having a copy of my com isn't there a little bit of a I mean I guess in that analogy if the library had a copy of my com that's like one thing if they then had a copy of how to start a Nazi cell so does that make it problematic or you can make the bombs and then if it is allowed in the library is that the library endorsing the creation of bombs to send to people or is it just the same as we're hosting content we're hosting the content what you do with it is your business we provide a shelf we buy the book though too that's good yes do you have any specific conclusion ones to talk about a lot but I'm not sure who was consulted which people were consulted and how far back if we've learned anything if a president was set from that conclusion and this talk was created from that I'm sitting in is it just more toxic coming we have an established edge case here that once we add to our list if we do then we will start creating a what would we call it portfolio of cases where we came down on this particular case was despite the fact that Dream Host has a contract with the fiscal entity that supports all work camps to be displayed and banked at every event in their region in the western hemisphere if you will the global community team said okay work camp organizing team if you want to drop Dream Host you can and Dream Host said we will not make a stink we disagree about the and they published a blog post on their own blog about their stance on free speech in the open web and but they said we're not going to try to raise the contract in this case we will step back if they want us to step back and the global community team came to the the organizing team and we said listen we get it the global sponsorship program that Dream Host is part of is incredibly incredibly important to our to the work that work camps do it funds the meetup program it funds our accessibility measures it makes it possible for so many work camps in very poor nations in very difficult political climates to happen because they get 80% of their fundraising goals met by these sponsors who are then credited on all work camps so please please please we understand that you want to drop them but please don't and we worked out essentially a compromise saying you know most will get their logo on the signage they won't they won't have a booth they won't ask for a booth I don't think they include their package included a booth or anything but and then I said and let's please use this powerful place that we have this powerful thing that we have which is work camp to continue to talk about this and let's have a panel on this topic and continue this conversation and that's where we are right now we don't in my callow youth as an organizer of organizers I was quick to say policy first I have since at the last seven years to change policy as slow as humanly possible because it's hard because you shouldn't change laws fast I think and it's not like these are laws but so we're still in a phase where we're not really sure what's going to happen but we do want to keep talking I hope that wasn't too long that was perfect perfect I would like to feel a little the very strong hope I have is this specific panel discussion of this work camp is that we can continue to talk about this outside of our formal meetings and meet-ups and so forth that this would become something you'd see on Slack channels and people would start talking about this as a real a real word of issue that would affect this even if it's not literally a door that you would have this was something that was an electrical exercise class somewhere so my question is Jason you talked a little bit about how WordPress has grown their weight around when it comes to certain things like the element of neutrality so my question is what lessons can enlarge your WordPress community and learn from what you guys are doing there's a lot of weight that comes with powering being a kind of plumbing with 30% internet and we probably could draw more lines in the sand if we wanted to and enforce more rules from is it top down maybe even just the other ground level so I'm curious what your thoughts are not going to take these learnings and extrapolate them out to a larger yeah I think we should understand that this is an issue and if we don't have this to exclude hate from our platform we'll become a platform for hate and we're starting discussion and I hope that we define what a hate group is and we define rules that we're not okay with them and somehow that becomes binding like starting with the work camp and the kind of foundation organizations because they do when they embrace the REST API and the code that people like me say alright I guess I'm embracing that technology too and when they embrace the GPL I was like I'd better get them bored if that's what the foundation and other things like I'm going to do the same thing so definitely seeing how this is starting like as a business I'm realizing like all my terms of service can't just say I'll fire you for whatever I want I'd actually need a very clear definition of like these are the values that I'm going to base that judgment on so it's more transparent so that myself and my employees when they're enacting this can feel more comfortable and can point back to those rules so I think we need to make sure that kind of the central governance keeps going where they're going and keeps presenting at work camps and things like this like as the rules come in like there was an interesting moment this morning and Tracy's talk she was talking about some of these issues and then the one question was I'm also hiring like how are you you know trying to do blind hiring to make sure that you're more inclusive in your hiring and that was like a very specific tactical tips for him to do that and so I hope like a year from now when these similar panels are coming they're more like here's what we've done and here's tips for you know how you can you know be on board too if you also want to combat the heat in the world and make sure that you know because I think it is like it's like a pivotal moment it's going to be tough I think uh that just about wraps it up thank you so much