[hs-equality] People at Metalab have taken issue with some incidents at 29c3

[Mitch Altman]

I had two very long group discussions about sexism on my last night of 29C3.  Both directly resulting from the cards being passed out to two people on stage running Hacker Jeopardy.  And both discussions seemed to center on whether these cards are the best way to help change the sexism in our culture.

The first discussion was really great.  Everyone, men and women, agreed that C3 is more open than many communities, but that sexism is still a problem.  Many people kept saying that the cards are not the best way to deal with the problem of sexism.  I pointed out (again and again), that they may not be the best way.  But that they are *a* way.  And that they seem to be working, based on all the discussion going on as a result of them.  We need other ways as well.

The second discussion was not so great (I left feeling very disappointed).  It included one of the two people on the stage who received a card, and friends of his.  The guy on the stage (I can't remember his name) felt really hurt.  And he was focusing on his anger at being hurt.  His friends felt angry because his friend was hurt (and angry).  The discussion went nowhere in the time I stayed.  I kept trying to acknowledge the hurt of the recipient of the cards, and acknowledge that hurting someone that hurts you is not OK, which raises another important issue to be dealt with -- but that it is important to see that the person who gave him the card is feeling hurt -- and that there are many people who are feeling hurt -- and we need to look at this, and try to be respectful, which is the point.  In this way our community gets more inclusive of people we want, and it grows stronger and better.  I left at 3am, and the people there were continuing to bolster their anger, and focused on their anger about the cards, and not the issues that handing out the cards is intended to bring up, or the feelings of the people who gave out the cards. 

I hadn't read the cards until the second discussion, where someone gave me a red card to read.  I was disapointed that the red card includes threats of physical violence (something to the effect of the recipient being lucky that they only received a red card, rather than being punched).  I think the red cards could be more effective if they left in the expression of hurt, but left out the threat of physical violence.

I still haven't read the yellow or green cards -- I hope they are more constructive in their expressions of hurt, and the problems of sexism they are bringing up.

But these cards are spurring discussions.  And I am glad for this.  Even if the discussion is contentious, the community is discussing.  And that is a good sign for our community.  I hope that after venting for awhile, individuals in our community can start focusing more on how some (if not many) people we want in our community sometimes feel uncomfortable and unwelcome -- and that we can change our behavior to make this much better for everyone.

I think HS-Equality is a fine place for this kind of discussion.

Best,
Mitch.

-------------------
From: m at niij.org
To: equality at lists.hackerspaces.org
Date: Sat, 5 Jan 2013 02:11:34 +0100
Subject: [hs-equality] People at Metalab have taken issue with some incidents at 29c3
Hi, It's hard to summarise all the discussion that has been going on since 29c3,but the short version is: the sexism debate escalated due to the use of creepercards, and other incidents. I'm currently not aware of many English blog postsbut one worth mentioning is certainly the one by Ada Initiative:http://adainitiative.org/2013/01/ending-sexism-in-hacker-culture-a-work-in-progress/ A few women that came from Metalab were also affected by harassment, and asignificant portion of our group witnessed crass sexist behaviour. Others, somethat stayed in Vienna, are also aware of the general circumstances and showsolidarity, so we had a meeting with ~40 people at Metalab yesterday evening.It concerned itself with writing some sort of statement to address ourexperiences. We will be publishing the minutes once they've been cleaned up abit (they have been posted to the internal mailing list) Today a few people from that crowd have started working on the following pad: http://piratepad.net/metalab It already got contributions from people who we don't know the faces of :) Yay!We're working in English (in part because we have a visitor that is helping,Adam from MakeHackVoid, Canberra, Australia) but will certainly translate oncewe have assembled a more verbose version. It'd be great if we could host some of the outcome of this onhackerequality.org - if anyone objects, please let me know and why! Please contribute! Even if you haven't been at 29c3 - it acted merely as acatalyst to start this thing up. The issue is one we face everywhere. Best,Michael-- https://niij.org/
_______________________________________________ Equality mailing list Equality at lists.hackerspaces.org http://lists.hackerspaces.org/mailman/listinfo/equality