[diversity] Draft CoC and response guide

Hi Benno,

On 9 May 2019, at 14:39, Benno Overeinder <benno at NLnetLabs.nl> wrote:
> I have added two comments in the Google Doc.  Feel free to remove or
> ignore them.

Regarding required vs expected in the first paragraph - yes, required is a
stronger term, but that’s on purpose? I don’t think we’d want to weaken how
binding the CoC is. It’s not a “please try to follow this”, it is a “you must follow
this if you want to participate”.

Regarding "Pushing a person to drink alcohol when they don’t want to drink,
or deceiving someone into drinking alcohol.”, I added that intentionally for
WTD in recent drafts. I imagine more questions might be asked about it, so
I wanted to explain it in some detail.

The reason I added it is that tech has a fairly heavy alcohol drinking culture.
Excessive alcohol use is a major instigator for serious CoC incidents, and
this is increased by the peer pressure of drinking alcohol. By making events
more pleasant for people who don’t drink, can’t drink, or don’t want to drink
more, the event becomes more welcoming to all and overall alcohol use
reduces, reducing risk of CoC violations.

I personally routinely also hear that people who can’t or don’t drink at all
don’t want to attend social events, because they think they’ll be hassled
or pressured about not drinking. It is normal for me to leave social events
early because most of the attendees are drunk to a level that I don’t want
to be myself, and it’s just no fun, and less safe for me.

The part about deceiving people about alcohol use does also happen.
People to whom alcohol is very normal and even expected to be “fun”
do not always realise that deceiving someone into drinking is potentially life-
threatening in some people. It doesn’t happen often, but it is part of the
drinking culture, and the impact can be very severe - so that’s why I added
it so explicitly.

As an example, last year I was at a conference and warned them about their
setup being likely to cause excessive alcohol use. They ignored my concerns,
and I decided to leave the party when I saw one attendee nearly breaking
their neck in reckless behaviour which organisers did not intervene in, and an
attendee trying to set another attendee’s clothes on fire with a lighter.
I don’t think I’ll ever go back to that event.
(I’m not aware of anything this bad happening at RIPE meetings.)

I wrote more about alcohol culture here:
https://medium.com/@mxsash/how-to-build-a-better-alcohol-culture-at-your-tech-conferences-and-events-9e1cce7179c0 <https://medium.com/@mxsash/how-to-build-a-better-alcohol-culture-at-your-tech-conferences-and-events-9e1cce7179c0>

Sasha

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