Hi,
On 14 Jun 2019, at 07:09, Daniel Karrenberg <
dfk@ripe.net> wrote:
Some of these are by-the-way also quite educational about what the
current draft can lead to, like: "One of the lightning talks contained
unfortunate phrasing directed towards one of the attendees. Video from
that lightning talk won’t be published online." No mention of who
decided this and how. Was it voluntary? This is the kind of censorship
that we as a community should not want.
I don’t know which conference this was, but it does occasionally happen
that a talk violates the CoC. Lightning talks are more at risk because they
tend to have less screening.
I don’t have the wider context, but I would expect that this decision was
made by the local Code of Conduct team, according to the response
guidelines for the conference.
A Code of Conduct response can not require voluntary compliance from
the reported person, as that would make the entire process entirely
ineffective. It’s entirely possible the speaker accepted the decision, but
even if they did not, that can’t be grounds for then just not taking action.
People that are removed from venues also often do not agree with that
decision, but that is a poor reason to just let them stay.
Would you consider every case where a talk recording is not published,
due to CoC violations, to be unwanted censorship?
In general, the decision process can only be public to a limited extent,
because otherwise it would risk harm to the involved parties.
In cases I’ve handled myself, about 80% have the reported person
entirely agree with the decision, which is always more pleasant. Those
numbers may not translate to the RIPE community though, because the
other communities I’ve worked in had done years of extensive inclusion
work, whereas the RIPE community is just getting started on this.
The emphasis needs to be on preventing and correcting unacceptable
behavior and not on sanctioning it. Therefore I *do* believe that a
community member who apologizes appropriately and does not repeat the
unacceptable behavior should not be formally sanctioned *by the
community*. The *community* then has no reason to sanction in this case.
I don’t know if I’m understanding you correctly. There are currently a number
of examples in the response guidelines that suggest immediate removal
from the space is likely to be appropriate, such as physical assault including
groping or punching someone.
Are you saying that even in physical assault, there should be no formal
sanction as long as there is only a single (known) case? Because that would
mean all 700 attendees are essentially permitted to assault another person,
as long as they only do it once?
Even though these are usually crimes, criminal prosecution is not likely to
be of any help for these cases - they have very little priority, and the first
moment to make an appointment to file a police report is probably long after
someone has already left the country. So either we enable a process to take
action from the community, even the first time, with a very short decision time
when needed, or we basically accept that physical assault is normal. Which
is essentially the current situation, because our community is incapable of
doing anything.
Sasha