Tag: floss

Friendly conference update

This post originally appeared on the Geek Feminism blog and is reposted here for posterity.

We announced a generic conference anti-harassment policy a couple of weeks ago. Since then several conferences have adopted anti-harassment policies, including Linux.conf.au 2011, FSF’s LibrePlanet 2011, and now all of Linux Foundation’s events have an official anti-harassment / discrimination policy. This includes 8 events in 2011 alone, including LinuxCon North America, LF End User Summit, and Kernel Summit.

Those of us who have attended Linux Foundation events will probably agree that their policy simply puts into writing what they were already doing. Other organizations which already have strong agreement on both standards of behavior and internal decision-making may be interested in adopting Linux Foundation’s simpler, streamlined policy. It is short enough to quote in its entirety here:

Linux Foundation events are working conferences intended for professional networking and collaboration in the Linux community. Attendees are expected to behave according to professional standards and in accordance with their employer’s policies on appropriate workplace behavior.

While at Linux Foundation events or related social networking opportunities, attendees should not engage in discriminatory or offensive speech or actions regarding gender, sexuality, race, or religion. Speakers should be especially aware of these concerns.

The Linux Foundation does not condone any statements by speakers contrary to these standards. The Linux Foundation reserves the right to deny entrance to any individual.

Please bring any concerns to to the immediate attention of Linux Foundation event staff, or contact Amanda McPherson, Vice President of Marketing at amanda (at) linuxfoundation (dot) org. We thank our attendees for their help in keeping Linux Foundation events professional, welcoming, and friendly.

(I helped write this policy as part of my pledge to help conferences adopt anti-harassment policies.)

Conferences that already had official harassment policies at the time of that announcement include OSDC and Ohio LinuxFest (one of the sources for the generic policy). LCA 2010 also deserves credit for including a clause on discrimination in its terms and conditions.

If your conference has an anti-harassment policy, let us know and we’ll blog about it on Geek Feminism! You can also add it to the list of conferences with an anti-harassment policy. If you are going to a conference that does not yet have an anti-harassment policy, and you would like to help change that, check out our list of conference organizer contact info.

The Thank-You Meme: The coreboot project

Advocates for women in open source burn out a lot. Here’s an idea to keep us going longer.

This post originally appeared on the Geek Feminism blog and is reposted here for posterity.

Recently, I was at a bar with 4 or 5 other women I knew through women in Linux advocacy. The striking thing was that, out of all of us, only one (Kirrily Robert) was still actively working on women in open source projects. The rest of us had burned out – and even Kirrily had burned out once before. This not atypical.

One of the reasons we burn out is the huge imbalance between positive and negative feedback. For every supportive email or blog comment, you get a hundred obnoxious ones. I have a theory: Most people in open source support what we are trying to do, it just doesn’t feel that way. On the Internet, no one can see you nod.

Here on the Geek Feminism blog, we’re going to try an experiment: The Thank-You meme. If you get a really positive, well-written thank-you for your work in women in open source, we’d love it if you shared it with the rest of us. Here are the rules:

1. The thank-you can’t be written specifically for this blog. It has to be a genuine, spontaneous thank-you. No astroturfing.

2. Along the same lines, you can’t post a thank-you that you wrote yourself. Feel free to send someone a thank-you, though!

3. Ask permission of the sender to post it. Offer to anonymize it.

4. If you haven’t heard back from the sender after a week, go ahead and post it, carefully anonymized.

And here is the inaugural Thank-You, from Carl-Daniel Hailfinger, a member of the