[diversity] Code of Conduct

Hi Rob,

I wanted to respond to one issue you raise in particular, as it’s also important going forward:

On 21 Oct 2019, at 12:53, Rob Evans <Rob.Evans at jisc.ac.uk> wrote:
> One thing that concerns me more is that we receive very few reports to the TCs despite comments about reportable events occurring, and I would like to understand why that is the case.  Are people not reporting because trying to find one of the three of us is too difficult? Because people aren’t sure what to report? Because we’re the wrong people? Because we aren’t perceived to be able to follow the reports up?  I don’t think it’s the latter, because newcomers probably aren’t as jaded about the role of TC as some on this list appear to be.

As someone with a lot of experience being on CoC teams, getting people to report things is one of the biggest challenges.

I have been on the “do I want to report this” quite a few times. The question I usually ask myself is: is it worth it? How much time and energy will this take me? Will I actually feel better or worse after making a report? Do I have any confidence that this will be taken seriously, or is there no point? Will they try to turn it on me or victim blame me, and how will that affect me?

A few stories of me reporting CoC incidents in events where I was not an organiser:

- A while ago I had an unpleasant experience at a conference. I asked how to contact the CoC team, but they kept insisting to just mail their info@ address. I decided not to follow up, as I had no confidence there was anyone in the team that had any idea how to deal with an issue. I ended up sneaking out of the venue carefully, as I believed this person might very well end up trying to follow me back to my hotel.

- Another time, I reported a blatantly sexist sponsor slide to an organiser. They responded with “well, I don’t know what to do”. The solution was obvious: delete that slide from the deck, but they refused to do that, or anything else. The only reason I even bothered to report at all was because I had an hour long conversation the night before with the same organiser about CoC management and I thought they understood. I heard a number of racist jokes later, which I didn’t even bother to report.

- In another conference, a friend had an unpleasant experience with a drunk attendee. I had an hour long conversation with the organiser about how everything about their conference setup was inducing excessive alcohol use, which is a huge trigger for CoC issues, and how they could still improve on that the next day. They did nothing to improve, and the second day had one drunk attendee trying to set someone else on fire (they seemed to know each other and see it as a joke?). I decided that given their previous lack of action, there was no point to reporting, so I left and never returned.

- As I mentioned in the plenary, I reported an issue that occurred on a RIPE working group mailing list, where reports should be sent to the respective WG chairs. I also CCed the trusted contacts. I sent numerous reminders and received a number of apologies for not receiving a reply, but never an actual response to my report. Last Tuesday, the report had gone a full year without any response, so I told them not to bother anymore. There was no reply to that so far.

In my personal experience, without other specific circumstances, the chances in a random tech event with a CoC are about 50/50 that a CoC incident will be worth the time and effort it takes to even write up a mail. This is why a CoC and everything surrounding it needs to work hard to raise the confidence that a report will be worth it. Because sometimes leaving and never coming back, is less painful than making a CoC report.

In the RIPE community, I have even less confidence in this, because the wording of the CoC is incredibly weak. If someone deliberately misgenders me (this has not actually happened at RIPE to me), one could easily argue that falls under “free speech” and “diversity of views”, which are very important according to the CoC. Will misgendering be seen as free speech if I report it? No idea. Do I want to take that chance? No.
Based on the CoC text, and the complete lack of a publicly documented process, the WG issue I mentioned above went precisely as I expected: poorly and a waste of my time.

So when I am in a CoC team, I take every chance I get to make people feel more comfortable with reporting. It’s why the CoC 3.0 explicitly lists a lot of behaviours that are not acceptable and why there is a publicly documented process. It’s why the text stresses that a reporter will not be punished for making a report that turns out not to be a violation. Why it specifically tells them that making multiple reports is ok. And that they’re not a burden for reporting.

I often also talk for a minute or two about the CoC during a conference opening, and there I stress the above points again, and basically tell people “if anything at all happens that makes you feel uncomfortable or weirded out, that is enough to talk to us, and we will not judge you or blame you for what happened”. But that only helps if that is a message you communicate consistently, and that is definitely not happening in the RIPE community now.

Sasha