 OK, next up, Molly de Blanc. Hi. Can you all hear me OK? Kind of, maybe? I'll move this up. My name is Molly de Blanc, and I wrote this talk because I thought it was funny, and then it became much less funny. So I'm sorry if you don't laugh enough. OK, if you become uncomfortable, leave the room. That's the first thing you should do. Then you can talk to the organizers. There are some wonderful people. Richard Fontana is here, Karen Sandler, Tom Marble, Bradley. Bradley? Oh, someone. I don't know. I forget. And you can talk to me later, but let's not do that right now. I'd really prefer if you don't tweet angry awful things at me because I talk about that. But if you feel really inclined, just hashtag it free software because not enough people do that. Cool. Here are some things about me. I'm not an academic. I have no training in statistics, demography, anthropology, or sociology, so I don't actually know what I'm talking about. But let's just run with it. I took some literature classes in college. That helps, right? I'm really interested in free software. I love free software. It's one of my favorite things in the world. I think copy left is great. I think sharing is great. I think being able to play with the stuff that you have is great. But I think we can do better. I think as a community, we're good, but we could do better. And sometimes we succeed at this, and sometimes we fail. I'll probably be offensive to someone in this room. And eventually, at some point, we'll talk about policies. And I swear my presence is at least arguably relevant. So hopefully we'll laugh. Sometimes we'll be upset or angry. I will swear, at least. I don't know if you want to, but you're welcome to. And I'm going to say some awful things that may be triggering. I'm not speaking on behalf of FOSDEM or really the people organizing this room. And I really hope I don't offend you too much. So we're going to talk a little bit about some background stuff. Standards. We create community standards as tools to help us understand what we're doing. Standards include things by the Free Software Foundation and the Open Source Initiative. These are formal practices that help us define what things are or what things aren't. In these particular cases, these two groups talk about what is free software and what counts as open source through formal definitions they've created. We also have best practices. Best practices can be formal or less formal. They're things everyone understands while they're not required, they're good to have. And then we have social contracts. Debian and Gentoo both have social contracts, at least on their websites. These are kind of in between the two. People agree to them. People sign them. People formally ascribe to the ideals of a community. And that's another thing. So some of these things are prescriptive and some of them are descriptive. When something is prescriptive, it means we're saying you should do this, and this is the ideal. And when something is descriptive, instead we're describing what's actually happening and trying to create things from that. So one really great norm is us saying awful things. This was one of my favorite things I've seen on Twitter ever because, fuck, free software. I'm going to read all these in case anyone here is blind. There was a name here. I changed it. Go fuck yourself. Fake operator is free software that we will fix at our own pace. It's being fixed, you arrogant prick. And actually, this is my favorite tweet of all time. Just says it all. It says fuck free software, BTWs. One of the things I learned in looking at Twitter is that people are really mean. Sometimes they're mean on the internet. Why are people mean? That's a Taylor Swift quote. If we got any Taylor Swift fans in the house, anyone? OK, just me. That's fine. Sometimes people are mean because they think or know they're right, and they don't understand why other people don't also think or know they're right. Sometimes people are mean because they feel like they're anonymous. They can get lost in a crowd. And because they can't necessarily be identified as an individual, there's less at stake socially and professionally. Here are some other reasons. There can be lack of repercussions. If there's no reason why being mean has a negative effect, why would you not do it if you want to? Groupthink creates contexts in which it's OK to kind of all ascribe to the same idea, even if you don't necessarily believe it when you first show up. Some examples of this in online communities are people who are male rights advocates or activists, people who are in the red pill community on Reddit. So people who kind of all start talking about awful things together and get into it. And that kind of flows into cultural norms. Cultural norms can also be institutional at much broader levels. Mental health and lacking sense of self. When people feel bad about themselves, they're much more inclined to try to make other people feel bad. And some people are actually just mean. Simon Rego, who's a psychologist and a director of several psychological education programs, reminded us that when you're stripped of nonverbal cues, the patterns of speech, the rate, tone, and context, you are left with is a lot of guesswork. He said this when talking about how people talk online and how people interpret what other people say online. So this is a lot of text. I'm really sorry. I'm not going to say it all. Maybe you can read it on the slides later. A woman named Lindy West had her father die. And then somebody who didn't like something she was saying created a fake Twitter account and a fake email account and began sending her really awful things from her father. She wrote an article on Jezebel about this experience and then the person apologized. It turns out that not only do you feel powerful when you feel anonymous, you also feel like people aren't people when they don't have faces or they don't have real names or they're just really far away from you and you never get to see each other. When you talk to someone who's a troll and can somehow personalize your experience, frequently they apologize. This person said, I'm sorry, multiple times in this email. And at some point, which I deleted, he says he feels bad about himself as a person in general and lashed out. I promised you some swearing and laughing and this isn't funny. So we're getting there soon, I swear. Codes of conduct, community guidelines and other creative names. People come up with lots of names to describe codes of conduct. Frequently these are in mailing lists or communities on forms or at events. And some of them I think are kind of silly names. I think Code of Ethics is kind of a silly name because you're not actually really talking about how people are behaving or how people should behave. There's a lot of really great stuff out there about writing codes of conduct. The most important thing that they do is they create a language around what behavior is bad and what behaviors aren't allowed. Ideally, they also talk about repercussions. So how do we talk in public? This is the Twitter part. What I did is I looked up a bunch of search terms on Twitter. I gathered a few thousand tweets, worked through them to get relevance. My search terms were all based on fuck and either free software or open source. I don't know if you've ever searched Twitter, but if you put little frowny faces in your search terms, it comes up with everything that lists as negative sentiment. And Twitter has amazing sentiment analysis, actually. So these are the end results I had, much less than several thousand. Some specific data looking at free software and fuck. Most of them are actually relevant. So people who think to use the term free software have useful things to say, useful. Things that weren't relevant were mostly focused on the cost of software. So one of my recommendations is that when people somehow see tweets, when someone says, oh, I'm sick of this free fucking software I got in college, now I can't use it anymore because my license expired since I'm no longer a student, you can totally reach out to them and go, hey, have you tried this? It's great, and it respects your freedoms. This is an example of something that was completely irrelevant. The word fuck appeared in it and the word free software appeared in it, but it wasn't actually really talking about anything useful. We got sentiment for when things were relevant, when people said yes. A number of these were about to do whatever the fuck you want license, which is an interesting choice of name. There's some good things about it and some bad things about it. Most of them unsurprisingly were negative. This is a breakdown of specific topics. Community-based ones are about communities and how people interact in them. Free software is kind of about the idea of free software or specific projects, proprietary software, fuck proprietary software, try this awesome piece of free software instead. Positive stuff was frequently about community or about free software in general. There are a few random things. This is more stuff. This was using hashtags, so things in hashtags while there were fewer results, there was a much greater sense of relevance overall. And these were more positive. So it turns out that when you think about what you're saying enough to throw a hashtag in front of it, you end up with people being a little more conscientious. Oh, and they also talk about NVIDIA. It turns out, it's its own category. Looking at free and open source software, you're also getting larger amounts of relevance and you're getting people thinking more about what the kinds of things that they're saying. These things are more angry. I looked up floss at one point with a hashtag and I decided it was useless because it was all about dentistry. So one of the things about floss is people really don't like proprietary software, it turns out. That makes me happy. So we're not always nice. Here are some specific examples of ways we're not always nice. Dear Free Software Foundation, thanks. I was already aware of SOPA and PIPA, now fuck you, because I'd like to learn Emacs before midnight. If you're trying to learn Emacs before midnight, you're probably doing it wrong in some way. And as someone who follows the FSF's Twitter, I would request or suggest that you tweet at them in the future, whoever this is. I'm sorry if you said any of these things, I'm sure you're great actually. I think that midnight's on the end of the world clock. Oh, that makes sense. I love this one. Fuck you, Firefox 3. If I can't download your free software when I want, I'm just going to go back to IE 7 and bullshit standards or Netscape. Do you guys kind of know the history of open sourcing code in the first place? No? Okay. So this is really funny because I'm pretty sure it was Netscape that was like the first major project to say, here's our code, have fun. So that makes me giggle every time. It's hard to contribute to your project, fuck you and you've sickened me, suck my radical free software agenda. What's actually kind of nice about this is they're being critical of something that we sort of need to be critical of. BSD, fuck you with a cockpony. I'm not really sure how to take that one. I think it's kind of funny though. We'll get later on to why I like the word cock so much. I swear it's not too weird. Ubuntu is my name. I couldn't write this word. We don't say it in America. I don't know what people do here. Love you for life like fuck you free software. I think they were meant to be positive. I labeled it as jerks to be safe. There's a lot of nuance. I tried to actually find things out about these people to see if it was, at least in the US, socially acceptable for them to use this language, but I couldn't see anonymity. We also care about licenses. We like to talk about licenses. What the fuck? Why is Android going so close? It being false is what made me love it. Bloody Google. See, they tweeted at Google. It's useful. They didn't get a response, but they tried. These sort of things also kind of make me happy in a way. I am not sure they're the classiest things people could say, but they're definitely expressing some dedication to the idea and an investment in free software itself. Fuck retweet slash dot the Android SDK is no longer free software. Android changed their SDK and someone was mad about it as well. Fuck you Red Hat. Fuck you for imposing fucking licensing issues on fucking free software. I would have said free fucking software. I'm sorry for providing my Twitter commentary right now, but I have lots of thoughts on how you should tweet. In case you're wondering, the best weapon we have for free software compliance is Debian. That team does not fuck around. There's like a lot of Debian love on Twitter actually. A lot of positive things people say about Debian. Sometimes they talk about how hard it is to install. This was kind of a collection of things what I sort of liked about this particular section. There are generally about Mozilla and Firefox. I'm not gonna read them all. Is that it highlights that people don't actually know what is open source and what is free software, not just from a definitional standpoint, but from what are we classifying in these ways? Fuck that. Urban terror HD won't be open source anymore. They're upset. You messed up decisions. Show a little concern for open source Twitter API. Let's shut down the account API. Fuck them because profits. Tentatively recommend reading the, I think it's like the first or second chapter of free software, free society, because it talks about this actually, like the relationship between profits and decision making. You can also read it online somewhere. It's free in different ways. There were, again, eight tweets on NVIDIA. That was pretty good. We also care about contribution apparently. I don't know if we care about it from the best perspectives, but we do care about it. Dear people complaining about tiny little problems and otherwise awesome free software, submit your bug and then shut the fuck up. In a way, this is a call to action, but it's free software. That means you need to contribute back, fix it yourself or shut the fuck up. These two contrast each other because this one about submitting your bug is actually talking about like an easy way to make commentary and to participate. This one's like much more complex. I'll translate an open source project for free, but to commercial ventures who crowd source translation, I say fuck off and die. We also have a lot of opinions about ourselves. Am I talking too fast, by the way? Okay, great. Is Android really free software? More commentary on how we're fitting together. This week we learned woman says fuck is considered a more important story than free software project leader justifies abusing contributors. Hey, FOSS project maintainers, if the only people telling you you need a code of conduct or COC are people who don't even write code then fuck them. We should replace what the fuck open source with what's the fix, open source. So cute. Slash dot, slash dot says a lot of things about free software and open source that like get really upset. What's great about this contextually is it's actually about slash dot doing site redesign, but they decided it was particularly relevant to the open source community. Wait, so why do I love free software again? Because people say really nice things too, right? Why the fuck do I write free software? Because love is stronger than hate and I love my free software friends. Adult male hackers are elevated to 10-year-old girls when someone breaks out the free software computer stickers. Fuck yeah, 10-year-old girls are great. I was one once. Hey guys, feel like playing Solitaire? Fuck the Windows one and support this. It's a free version, it's really cool. I didn't try it. Fucking fact, verbous is the shit. Bugs found by users on Facebook, iPad app, I just want to tell Facebook fuck it, just put it on GitHub and let us fix it. I think like this is an idea that drives open source a lot in general, which is like we can take care of things. Holy fuck, they just made Swift open source, Apple. People highlighting people who are excited when things like align with these things. I fixed it. Fucking fixed it. Fuck you, Android, I am your master. I've been back. I've been to the darkest depths of hell and now I am back. Thank you. We now block all IP addresses that are located in Cuba. I ran North Korea, Sudan and Syria. It's a thing Docker decided to start doing. I believe it was in compliance with a number of US embargo standards and there's something actually like particularly inspiring about people being upset by these decisions. Ubuntu first boot, shit gotta be lit. Fuck yeah. And then there's some, I don't really know what to say about them. I don't know what hashtag free Willy O knows up as free software, ha ha ha, fuck you so pa means. Nor this, I met a developer, I asked him what he does and he said that he does open source. What the fuck is open source? Frick a noob, that person is a noob. Why the fuck should we use an open source and free alternative software? I'm making an illegal copy over the internet of whatever we need. Well what now, what can Twitter do? It turns out that Twitter is really bad at enforcing their policies and in fact, Twitter has policies and Twitter has had policies since before each of those tweets existed. Now, here are some specific things they talk about. You can check out their more in depth commentary on what they do see. I'm talking about policies now. They have content boundaries, abusive behavior and spam. I don't know if you're really on Twitter but I get lots of spam followers and spam messages all the time. I think that if you look more in depth into things people have said, both in broader context when we wanna talk about things like Gamergate or not just trolling but threats of physical violence, these things persist both in terms of their existing and in terms of people not getting rid of this archeological, technical, awful stuff. So a good question actually is who should police our community? Nose game, not it. Last person, the best I could do. Who if anyone should police our community, right? So is it our job to be talking to people about these things? Should we expect Twitter to make these decisions on our behalf about what is or isn't okay? I don't have an answer to this. I think you should all think about it. So how do we talk in our own spaces? After I spent an amount of time looking at how we're talking publicly, I was interested in how we talk to ourselves and about ourselves. It's more than just the word fuck. Oh, there's this Debbie and Fag going around trying to get everyone else to use free software. Fag is the bad word there. They did not mean like cigarettes. Free software Faggot is apparently what the FFF stands for. I know lots of things about open source suck a dick. And I'll explain why all of these fit together soon. Please fuck off and die in a big chemical fire before I get there to beat you. I kind of like this one actually. The power of language extends beyond the intentions, extends beyond the intentions behind words to the historical and linguistic meaning of the words themselves. What does this mean? This means that the word fuck has in a number of ways become entirely meaningless. And more specifically, the word Faggot has become entirely meaningless and is frequently just used as a generic insult. What it's actually doing when you call someone a Faggot, when you call someone a Fag, when you use gay as an insult, you're actually like alienating a decent part of your community. There are people there who are upset, who feel unwelcome and who feel unable to participate because this is language people are using. Cursing can be fun. So I'm not saying we shouldn't do it at all. But, and some of these things don't have to be bad words, but cocksucker is a bad word. I really like cocksucker as an example when talking like meta linguistically or about meta conversations about linguistics because it's a really vile, visceral way to call someone gay as an insult. And actually if you think about it for like a little bit, what you realize is that they're actually insulting everyone who is sexually attracted to men. Turning that into like a really bad thing, debasing people who are doing that. So I wanted to look at something else now and I found the Linux kernel mailing list because it seemed like a good idea at the time. The Linux kernel mailing list is known for being awful which is why I thought it was a good idea. So I created a list of words that are damaging in the same way cocksucker and Faggot are and I compared them to use of pre and post code of conduct on the Linux kernel mailing list. Oh yeah, does it, yeah, I'm so used to code of conduct. They call it a code of conflict actually and we're gonna talk about that in a little bit. Here are some words for sexuality. The, this is on the later side, the Linux kernel mailing list over its lifespan since 1996 has over two million messages. So from that, these numbers are actually kind of insignificant. It turns out that also no one calls each other a cocksucker and that's just an in-person conversation tactic. Though they do use phrases like suck a dick. Fag is really commonly used. Sometimes this is like just linguistic tendencies or slang within a community. Faggot, no one calls each other dykes and like they're generally pretty okay leaving lesbians like leaving lesbians specifically alone unless they're talking more about people who are lesbians or a handful of messages where it occurs a number of times. Homo is all irrelevant because they were all talking about like human like evolutionary development. I'm going to be using the, wait, P.S. I'm going to be using the code for my purpose. So, oh right, that was, so that was one thing somebody said. I'm gonna be using the code myself so slave away fucking faggots. This is a lot, the, there was this like long, there are these really long posts specifically about system D. So I maintain at this point that system D is a dirty word. Thank you. And there's like even more than that. People really love to call Leonard a faggot. I don't know why. I'm like the fact that he had to then express publicly or felt the need to about his sexuality like makes a comment about how people are thinking about homosexuality and about gayness within free software and technology in general. But it's also like this idea that he has to defend himself personally, defend in finger quotes, himself personally in this like public context. This is more of that. Social justice warrior is also a bad term. These are really long posts. So I'm just kind of bolded things. If you want to read these in depth later, I can send you the slides. This is more of that. People wrote these long emails. Well, then it gets kicked out of Debbie and by the faggots and enemies. People take criticism of their code very personally. Oh, I have more in cocksucker. It's a great word. So this is more of that. This is describing things from a performance angle. So they're making technical commentary about using gayness as an insult for technical performance. So there's also this category of people who decide to add these keywords at the bottom of their posts. And it includes things. Oh yeah, that was the one use of homo. Includes both terms that might trigger the NSA. Somebody wrote another post explaining why they did this. But it also uses things like pedophile, lesbian to call those out. And this generally doesn't free welcoming behavior because you're using more words in either ways that are insulting or ways that are meaningless. And you're really taking down somebody's self-identity as a lesbian by saying, I'm using this as a trigger to get people to be mad at me. There's misogyny. This is me, twice. It's not quite aware if you're in the back of the room and you can't see this. When most people try to describe me, one of the terms they frequently use as a woman is a woman. So misogyny is near and dear to my heart. Kant is one of the words whore, trans. So out of that we were pulling like transsexual, transgender, transwoman, transman. And then feminist and feminism. They talk about feminists and feminism a lot on the Lenox kernel mailing list but it is also a dirty word. Porn span is a problem as well. So a number of these things turn up like in span messages from porn and they still exist in the archives. I would make the argument that people who are archiving emails while there is value to having extensive archives, you should still like actually get rid of this stuff because when you're searching through and obviously if I'm looking for the word cocksucker and like an archive, I know I'm gonna find things I don't like but seeing specifically these porn span males with these in-depth descriptions is actually not what I'm looking for. So I just found it annoying. One of the things here is they define social justice warriors. There's this recurring theme where people describe male feminists in this way as though they are weak and that that's a bad thing. They also call women spinsters which isn't a term you hear a lot anymore. So this one particular person who wrote this really in-depth thing like mostly about System D and Leonard who's apparently a social justice warrior and male feminist, I don't know Leonard so I don't really know this. Like when on Tease the Word spinster like I was really impressed by their creative use of language ongoing, they define a woman as a do nothing cunt. Generally when people talk about identification of women in terms of their genitalia, it's turning the value of a person into a sexual object. And then these feminists, they hid everything. I was really like, I just appreciated it. They also talk about worthless women and thinking that women don't contribute to communities or that their contributions aren't valuable. If you think back earlier to Twitter when someone is talking about how if the only people who want a code of conduct aren't people who contribute code, then you shouldn't have this. It's actually not valuable and important because those people aren't important and valuable contributors. Here even more feminist horrors, there are whatever. And Nancy's as another insult for men, like really good use of language. I find politically correct stuff, this is someone else, so tasteless that I'd rather shake hands with a whore with AIDS. Yes, that was meant to be politically incorrect than one of the Bible thumpers. With this, somebody made a decision that in spite of conversations going on about how there's a need for policy because this was after Sarah Sharp said that, like, the Linux kernel mailing list needs a code of conduct. People went out of their way to really try to trigger what was going on not just in terms of their use of words but by making it clear they were intentionally using those words. Thunderbird is written by aged whore monkeys stoned on crack. Yeah. And this is another really long one, also criticizing by someone else, criticizing the role of women in Debian and kind of the slant the Debian community has taken to try to make it more inclusive in a number of ways. It goes on to talk about this. There is insults about transgender person with a strong implication that that is one of the problems with them and problems with the people they live with who also identify as trans and intersex. They make fun of the outreach program. They also talk about system D more because everyone hates system D. And then they like later on pull out feminist again as an insult. This time in reference to women rather than men feminist is a dirty word within the Linux kernel community or at least was for a long time. And I would make the argument that in the greater open source and free software community it is still frequently treated as a dirty word. More mail space base. Again, feminism, but do you hate feminism? Oh, but hating, if you write free software release free media of every type and in quantity, but hate feminism you're a plague on the open source community. This is an ongoing conversation that people should have when they're actually discussing whether or not you're trying to create a product as quickly as possible regardless of its functionality the cleanest of its code or the like the overall usability of it or you want to kind of construct this space of contributors in this space of people and what that requires is creating spaces where people are welcome. And we'll talk about that in a little bit. Feminists need to be thrown out of kernel development like how they threw anti-feminist men out of Debian and other Linux distro development. The Feminist Software Foundation that was also meant to be a bad thing but I would be super into the Feminist Software Foundation. Falsified operational in terms of like coding creating a form of the Linux journal and replacing it with documentation with like some feminists trying to be feminist sounding bingo Yeah. That was the name of the account Feminist Software Foundation. Yeah. Is that related? I don't remember. I remember I have like I have that in my I have that actual thing in my file of like data somewhere and later on I can dig it up and check. I don't remember. So this one is someone saying dude I'm not on a horse here I'm not asking you to change your communication styles in order to help minorities I'm not some crazy feminist ranting about cooties on Google plus. This made me sad when I read it it was written by somebody who I think I believe self identifies as a feminist somebody who has done a lot of work to create inclusive and diverse communities and they said this about themselves so they were distancing themselves from the concept of feminism within the Linux kernel community and they made it clear that like it was very apologetic in its nature of calling someone out on their behavior. Now here's some stuff on racism because we're also racist. I don't know how to write this slide either. There are there's a variable that I searched for and I got some results and some highlights are no one was born to act and behave like a nodding dot dot dot in front of you if you don't want to take it like that well you're strictly obsolete man it disgusts me to no end that the bleeding of scary scary sheep is so prominent in America the new wave of patriotism like the hand of your master and praise him for beating someone other than you the house mentality alive and well now in every race and creed. I also looked up these two people they're both white and talking especially in a community that is so white and has such problems with racial diversity like using that language not just as commentary and not just as an insult but by contextualizing it in like awful institutional discrimination is like it pains me but no one said anything about Jews so does this actually matter right as of last night there were 2,641,204 messages in the Linux kernel archives which lasts from 1996 to 2017 there's also a post from 1910 I was very impressed with them to contextualize a little bit about what how big that number is is it's almost as big as the city of Rome it's bigger than Paris and it's more than twice the size of the entire population of Brussels so because when I was looking at this I pulled my most recent data from November of 2016 and I had 115 messages total at the time there were 2,577,702 messages on the mailing list when I tried to make a chart of like how small 115 is compared to 2.5, 2.6 million it was unreadable and how tiny 1.1,115 is so this is really the minority of things people are saying but there's some of the biggest things and there's some of the things that get pressed and these are the ways that we are like presenting ourselves as like to the rest of the world so now we're gonna talk about codes of conduct for a little bit it's pronounced COC not TOC just to clear up confusion the Link's Journal mailing list merged a code of conduct in early March of 2015 there are code of conflict, sorry this was very divisive and contentious ultimately Linus merged it himself which was considered a triumph by a number of people in the community did this, here's some things from the code of conflict itself your code and ideas behind it will be carefully reviewed often resulting in critique and criticism know that this happens because everybody involved wants to see the best possible solution the development process has been proven to create some of the most robust operating system kernel ever you go, we do not want to do anything to cause the quality of submission and eventual results to decrease if you're thinking about your project in a long term you're with this really not thinking about it in a long term you're thinking about it in terms of the immediate results of what somebody is submitting and creating in a given moment rather than what your community is doing and can succeed at overtime diversity and inclusivity is invaluable and necessary for communities to be successful because you need a variety of experiences and knowledge in order to create things that are robust and in order to create things that can last for a long time more on the code of conflict personally abused, threatened or otherwise uncomfortable due to the process people are made to feel this way it's not acceptable please contact the Linux Foundation's technical advisory board they will work to resolve the issue something that's yes five minutes oh, five minutes great something that's considered kind of like a bad part of codes of conduct and anti-harassment policies is when people are skipping over these kinds of things like not making it clear how you can like who you can talk to like really depersonalizing who you can talk to and like this entire thing this entire code of conflict to be a little critical of it not that I haven't been critical of it already is that it's focusing on not the individuals but the concept of who they are their value as developers please try to keep things civil and focused on technical issues be excellent to each other did this help? kind of so looking at the post-COC results a number of the words that I searched for originally actually didn't show up again and but they hadn't shown up again for a long time I think lesbian was actually 2014 but the word faggot was last posted in February of 2015 March was at the beginning of March was when the code of conflict was added to like the Linux kernel community and operating procedures feminists last showed up in February of 2015 so apparently the Linux kernel mailing list also thinks feminists is a bad word so people stop saying faggot and feminist do these people matter? yes the total usage of the word fuck before the code of conduct over the course of the Linux kernel mailing list was 893 since March it's gone down significantly someone said COC once in 2015 and there were 79 total occurrences so that's also gone down people said please and thanks less after the code of conflict was instituted one possible theory on this is that the focus of the conversation was much more technical as opposed to like dealing more with community issues before the code of conflict was instituted people went a lot more out of their way to thank each other for contributions and for work do faggots and feminists matter because we insult them? yes so even though it's only a few cases like we still shouldn't be doing this and codes of conflict need to be thought about and behavior needs to be thought about back to behavior I'll try to do this really quick behavioral guidelines are things we have we have codes of conduct at conferences we have anti-harassment policies do they help? nope they help a little bit here are some examples post-events instituting codes of conduct this is only a few of the ones I found Oskan had pervasive sexual attention on a community member KS Communication Congress instituted a gender and neutral bathroom policy to try to make people who didn't identify within a gender binary more uncomfortable nonetheless attendees who did not identify within the gender binary were still harassed in bathrooms context was a science fiction convention that was ineffective in a number of ways after their anti-harassment policies introduced science fiction matters to us because there's a lot of overlap between the two communities at ISC2 a woman was drugged after the code of ethics was instituted in 2015 et cetera, et cetera Geek Feminism has a timeline of total incidents reported at various geek events it increases over time this could be done for many reasons more women are going to events and more people feel more theoretically I believe more people feel more privileged within these communities and as though that behavior is acceptable codes of conduct are becoming more common which actually helps and there are some successes not everything sucks all the time attendees have been removed from events and people have been banned from events for things that they've done in the community even outside of the event itself with this goal and hope of creating safe spaces there are more codes of conduct FOSSTEM and it's wonderful way when it was asked about the lack of code of conduct very quickly created one and this is creating an institutional norm so these codes of conduct are really important because what they're doing is they're letting people know that the community and especially the people organizing something the moderators on a list or form or the people running the conference actually care about them care about creating these spaces where they can be and trying to put effort into doing better here's a call to action these are things that we can do to help each other you should tell your stories and you should tell your event stories this is either if you feel comfortable sharing specific things that happen to you especially men who feel as though negative things have happened to them because obviously women sharing these things is only making so much of a difference so it's time for privileged men to step up and share their experiences as well because then the people doing awful things can like connect with you more we're much more inclined to feel connected and to share ideas and be comfortable around people who look like us tell your event stories so in the same way but I also really want people to share more data about things that happen at their conferences so like share a number of incidents reported don't do this in an anonymized way but having numbers on that would be really useful when we're looking at instituting policies when we're trying to make arguments to people who value statistics and data that they should be doing these things and enforce policies unless you're enforcing a policy nothing it's useless it's not making any difference because there are no negative repercussions so I still love free software in spite of all of this and if anyone has any questions and we have any time that's my cat yeah my cat's name is Bash he's adorable thanks I was wondering if you felt that the adoption of codes of conduct has created an environment where people feel safer reporting them and that could explain the increase in incidents I think so I have thought about that and I think that is partially true I think things like like the Linux kernel mailing list code of conflict and the code of ethics from LILC whatever that was don't do a really good job at talking about who you should talk with at creating like saying to someone you should email someone else is really removing it from the situation and it's good to have the option to email someone but when that's your only like point of recourse like that's not the best thing to do Sarah Sharp now does event and community incident training and response and in it there's a lot of stuff about like clearly identifying people making sure that your list of people to talk with is very diverse so that somebody can hopefully find someone who looks like them or who they'll be comfortable around and creating these spaces to talk anything else okay awesome thanks Molly