 So, first I should let you know that this is based on a book written by my grandmother and it is a thing that my parents and my grandmother, kind of a system for communication that they used to help me respond more patiently and less meanly and it has proven to be extremely useful in my life because for one, as we all know if you're involved in any online communities like, you know, WordPress or Steam or Twitter or anything else that you have, you run into bullies and trolls and people who generally are not following the code of conduct that you've laid out and it can be really hard to know how to respond to them adequately. And so, as a general disclaimer, I'm not saying that if you follow this system that I'm about to talk about, what will happen is all the bullies and all the mean people are going to go away and we're going to fix all the world. I'm not saying that so don't tweet that. However, it will certainly give you kind of a quick start guide of things to ask yourself before you start doing any sort of conflict mediation and also give you a set of tools, kind of a toolkit to work with as you go. This book was read by all of the technology team at a company that I used to work for that was just notorious for having incredibly bad interpersonal communication inside their office. We had remote workers and half distributed and the tech team had so much trouble communicating with the rest of the people in the building. This is not standard. Tech folks are so nice all the time. But after they read this book, it really vastly improved everybody's quality of life as far as being a member of that workforce goes. So the first thing that I want to talk about is being able to recognize verbal attack patterns. These are, just so you know, plentiful. There are eight, so if you want to just take a photo of them on the next slide, get your phones ready now, but this is specifically English-based speech patterns. And so we're going to take a look at those. There are two parts to a verbal attack and one is an attack that has a quick emotional reaction so that you instantly get started in a fight. And the other part is the other part of a verbal attack is designed to keep control of that person and keep them in the fight with you. These are the eight common attack patterns in the English language. Like I said, we'll stop. You can take a photo. We're not going to get through them today. And I won't try. But the first part of it is debate. That is the part that elicits an immediate and often visceral emotional reaction from the person who is being attacked. And then the second part is the presupposition. It's one or more, often more, thinly veiled assumptions about the person that is being attacked, who they are, what they're doing, and what they know. I'm going to wait until I see some cell phones go down. I see you back there. All right. Just by show of hands, how many of you contribute back to an open source project? Any open source project? So this example might seem familiar. It comes without judgment, just letting you know. It is also not something that we specifically pulled out of any open source project. But we'll feel familiar regardless. So this says, if you really cared about this project, you wouldn't waste time asking questions that everyone knows the answer to. You may not have heard exactly those words, but you've definitely heard that sort of sentiment. And you can see already that it's extremely hard to figure out these stresses in text. No one actually writes an attacking comment and gives you text stress like this. And most likely, they're also not sitting right in front of you saying, you there, don't care about us. However, let's take this apart. And we can kind of get an idea of what we're talking about when we say bait and when we say presuppositions. This part that you see highlighted in red, waste time asking questions, that is the bait part of this attack. It is designed to make your fight or flight part in your brain say, oh, oh, they think that I'm wasting time and panic and start a fight with you. There are two presuppositions in here. This is the first one really cared about this project. It's assuming that for one, the person who's asking the question doesn't care about the project. And unfortunately enough, it assumes that if you do care about a project, you never ask questions. This is not true. But that is a presupposition that's built in there. And there is a specific purpose to it, which I'll talk about after we look at the second presupposition. The next one is everyone knows the answer to. This is assuming that one, the attacker knows everybody, which they probably don't. And two, that everyone that they already know actually has that answer ready to go. The purpose of the presupposition in a verbal attack is to make sure that those people who are being attacked understand that the attacker is the one in power. They know more people. They care more about the project, all of that stuff. And so it takes this situation where you are ostensibly equals because everybody has a space to contribute to an open source project and says, your stuff is not as good as mine because I know more people and I care more. So the emotional response and then those presuppositions that set it up so that externally because they didn't say, I do care and questions mean I care, it's set up this idea that obviously you're not as good a contributor to the project. So to deal with this, the next things on this slide are very big picture, very hard to internalize. Don't panic just yet. These are the four basic principles that you should use any time that you're responding to a verbal attack from someone. First is to know that you're under attack. This is hard, as I mentioned, because so often we don't have the text stress. No one's bolding and highlighting things in red on the internet to let you know which one is the bad part and which one is the good part. But more importantly, you have to know the type of attack you're facing. This is equally hard. Sometimes it's fact based, buried in those presuppositions. Sometimes it's emotionally based there in that bait part. And so often it is a result of extreme fatigue over something that had nothing to do with you. And so understanding where the attack is coming from incredibly difficult, but also incredibly important. Know how to respond to the attack. We're not talking about this right now because it's coming up in the next slide. You should also have your phones ready for that, although we will take some time to go through them. Knowing how to respond to the attack is difficult on the internet, but we have five quick tips that will help you to figure out how to do it for yourself. And four, know how to follow through. It's one thing to know that you have just had a verbal attack or that you seem to be getting attacked by somebody on the internet or someone in the room with you. And an entirely different thing to know what to do about it. I don't have a lot to say about that other than to say tread carefully, use the tips that we are about to come up with on our quick start guide and then see what happens from there. So these five things that I'm about to tell you are things that, while I was trying to internalize those four principles, like I said, very broad, very big picture. When I was in college and trying to learn how not to be quite so mean on the internet because the internet was new, also don't tweet out that I was ever a mean person. I'm just not that scary. However, these five things really helped me to process the information correctly and respond as best I could given that I was, you know, in my teens. So the first thing is to ignore the bait. If you can identify which part of a comment is the bait and which part is the presupposition, ignore the bait part. That's the part that is designed to get you off guard and to get you off your center and start an emotional response fight. It's impossible to be attacked and not want to instantly attack back. That's that dumb, dumb part of your brain back there that's like, oh, it's going to kill me. I should fight it. So ignore the bait part as best you can. Now that you've done that, be sure to identify the presuppositions and find out what that's actually about. By find out what that's actually about, what I mean is ask yourself if there is truth in it. All presuppositions are based around facts about something. And that doesn't mean it's a fact about you. So for instance, in the presuppositions that we had in our example, if I said, if you really care about this project, that's your presupposition. The fact in that is that some people don't care about giving back to a project. Some people are asking questions that aren't necessarily relevant, but that's the part that you're trying to deal with. You can deal with it by saying, I do care about this project and I think that asking questions is the way to improve my understanding of it. If you're dealing with the second presupposition, which is that you're wasting every... Oh, no, that was the bait, which is that everybody already knows the answer. A thing that I always recommend to our community members and we're impressed is to say, if everybody has the answer, which is possible, perhaps we should make it easier to find. That is a fact-based response to a fact-based presupposition and all of a sudden you have not gotten yourself into a situation where the person who has said, you don't care about us, is just saying that and it's going unnoticed. You've said, I do care. These are the things that I care about. Let's make it better. And you're no longer losing face in the wake of that. This one was really hard for me as a teenager. So assume that no harm is meant. I had across my monitor taped just a little quote that said, any response that you make angry is the best response that you will ever regret. Because there's that moment where you're like, well, I'm going to show you and I'm going to send you this really mean email and you're going to know how smart I am because I mean, we can all take a moment and appreciate how crazy that sounds, right? And I felt that way. I was like, you're going to understand how smart I am because I'm faster at this fight than you are. So assuming that no harm is meant is an extremely important first step, but more important than that is to inhibit your gut reaction. So there's a law called Miller's Law that says, the only way that we can have healthy communication is to assume that whatever anyone is saying has some truth in it and then you should find out what that is true about. That's not literal. It's not word for word because that was in my notes. But if you look for Miller's Law, you'll find it. The important and difficult part about that is that if I say to you, hey, my toaster started talking to me and it scares me, your initial reaction is to say, well, that's crazy, toasters don't talk. But really if you want to have open and honest communication with people on the internet, to people in your life, what you should really be compelled to say is, man, that would really be stressful. What is the toaster saying to you? Right? That is an extreme example. I understand that if someone actually has a talking toaster, there are other things you should do. So again, don't tell anyone that I say toasters talk. Don't tweet that. Or tweet it and say that I didn't say it. So to inhibit your gut reaction is a really important part of things. So I've lost my train of thought. Inhibiting your gut reaction. That's not to say that your first reaction is not the right reaction. But just like that quote that I had at the top of my monitor said, if you make your gut reaction an angry response to something, that is always the wrong choice. But trust your gut. If you feel like you're being attacked and you think to yourself, the only thing that I can do here is to respond to these presuppositions, respond for heaven's sake. Don't let people attack you blindly. But also don't respond as angrily and negatively as you want to. The point of the response is to de-escalate the situation by addressing the incident, by addressing the presuppositions that are in it and the facts that are underlying in there. There are additional resources. This is a really hard thing to do. It took me, I wanna say like seven years to stop wanting to instantly say to you, you know what, you said this mean thing to me and right now I'm gonna say a mean thing right back to you. Took me seven years, everybody. I'm so glad you met me after that happened. I'm a much more pleasant person now than I probably was when I was 17. But the book, there is a book, The Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense, which as I mentioned is written by my grandmother. It is fantastic. It is a little bit outdated with some of the examples because it was written in 1984. So take that into account when you read it. But also the satir categories, which we didn't actually get to today. That helps you to understand whether you're dealing with an emotional response, whether you're dealing with a fact-based attack, anything like that. And then a couple of other books here as well. I'm going to stop for some photo-taking because I know that I wouldn't write all of that down in my notes. I think we are not in a question area. This is a no-question-answer area, correct? In that case, I won't open it up for questions. But, whoa. I would like to say thank you for coming to my presentation.