<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; line-break: after-white-space;" class="">Hi Benno,<br class=""><br class="">On 9 May 2019, at 14:39, Benno Overeinder <<a href="mailto:benno@NLnetLabs.nl" class="">benno@NLnetLabs.nl</a>> wrote:<br class=""><blockquote type="cite" class="">I have added two comments in the Google Doc. Feel free to remove or<br class="">ignore them.<br class=""></blockquote><br class="">Regarding required vs expected in the first paragraph - yes, required is a<br class="">stronger term, but that’s on purpose? I don’t think we’d want to weaken how<br class="">binding the CoC is. It’s not a “please try to follow this”, it is a “you must follow<br class="">this if you want to participate”.<br class=""><br class="">Regarding "Pushing a person to drink alcohol when they don’t want to drink,<div class="">or deceiving someone into drinking alcohol.”, I added that intentionally for</div><div class="">WTD in recent drafts. I imagine more questions might be asked about it, so</div><div class="">I wanted to explain it in some detail.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">The reason I added it is that tech has a fairly heavy alcohol drinking culture.</div><div class="">Excessive alcohol use is a major instigator for serious CoC incidents, and</div><div class="">this is increased by the peer pressure of drinking alcohol. By making events</div><div class="">more pleasant for people who don’t drink, can’t drink, or don’t want to drink</div><div class="">more, the event becomes more welcoming to all and overall alcohol use</div><div class="">reduces, reducing risk of CoC violations.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">I personally routinely also hear that people who can’t or don’t drink at all</div><div class="">don’t want to attend social events, because they think they’ll be hassled</div><div class="">or pressured about not drinking. It is normal for me to leave social events</div><div class="">early because most of the attendees are drunk to a level that I don’t want</div><div class="">to be myself, and it’s just no fun, and less safe for me.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">The part about deceiving people about alcohol use does also happen.</div><div class="">People to whom alcohol is very normal and even expected to be “fun”</div><div class="">do not always realise that deceiving someone into drinking is potentially life-</div><div class="">threatening in some people. It doesn’t happen often, but it is part of the</div><div class="">drinking culture, and the impact can be very severe - so that’s why I added</div><div class="">it so explicitly.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">As an example, last year I was at a conference and warned them about their</div><div class="">setup being likely to cause excessive alcohol use. They ignored my concerns,</div><div class="">and I decided to leave the party when I saw one attendee nearly breaking</div><div class="">their neck in reckless behaviour which organisers did not intervene in, and an</div><div class="">attendee trying to set another attendee’s clothes on fire with a lighter.</div><div class="">I don’t think I’ll ever go back to that event.</div><div class="">(I’m not aware of anything this bad happening at RIPE meetings.)</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">I wrote more about alcohol culture here:</div><div class=""><a href="https://medium.com/@mxsash/how-to-build-a-better-alcohol-culture-at-your-tech-conferences-and-events-9e1cce7179c0" class="">https://medium.com/@mxsash/how-to-build-a-better-alcohol-culture-at-your-tech-conferences-and-events-9e1cce7179c0</a></div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">Sasha</div><div class=""><br class=""></div></body></html>