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Couple pieces to this. First – the fact that this guy's employer made a kneejerk reaction is no one's fault but the employer. Next – let's talk about this red

Couple pieces to this. First – the fact that this guy's employer made a kneejerk reaction is no one's fault but the employer. Next – let's talk about this red herring of "sexism." Making a phallus joke might be sexist depending on context. Or it might not be. Sexism is not at issue here. The individual in question concedes that they did, in fact, make the joke. From PyCon's code of conduct: "All communication should be appropriate for a professional audience including people of many different backgrounds. Sexual language and imagery is not appropriate for any conference venue, including talks." A joke about dicks? That seems to run afoul of the code of conduct the attendees agreed to. Sexist or not. There's a discussion to be had around the best way to confront these behaviors. But regardless of your position on that, it remains the employer's decision, and therefore their mistake, to fire this person. (Disclosure: I am acquainted with Adria and we've appeared together on a panel.)

peterhunt 14y ago
I don't think anyone takes issue with talking to the PyCon organizers and even having them removed from the conference. The employer made a mistake for sure, but so did your friend. Skewering someone in public on the Internet like that is immature and irresponsible. There are a million better ways she could have dealt with this.
- lukeman 14y ago
  > I don't think anyone takes issue with talking to the PyCon organizers and even having them removed from the conference. They were not removed from the conference.
  - peterhunt 14y ago
    Oops! My point was that had stayed within PyCon it would not have been an issue (or at least not as big of one).
- djcapelis 14y ago
  > Skewering someone in public on the Internet like that is immature and irresponsible. There are a million better ways she could have dealt with this. I'm pretty sure relating and disclosing a situation that happened in a public place fully to the best of her ability shouldn't be something we call irresponsible. In fact, women who do otherwise are often asked to disclose in exactly the manner she did. No matter how a woman chooses to address something like this, there's always someone who wants to talk about how she should have addressed it differently.
  - peterhunt 14y ago
    This is not about her being a woman. This is about responsibly dealing with a situation. "Exactly the manner she did?" No one has ever been asked to disclose a photo with faces on Twitter to 9k followers. The right thing to do is either deal with the person directly or escalate above them, whether you're a woman or not. Going straight to the mob is never the right answer.
    - paranoiacblack 14y ago
      > The right thing to do is either deal with the person directly or escalate above them, whether you're a woman or not. Going straight to the mob is never the right answer. Isn't this exactly what happened though? She posted on her feed and asked if someone could speak to them and the Pycon officials saw her post and did exactly that. You're treating this as if she posted on her feed something like, "Can the people who employed these guys please fire them? Also, I want each of my followers to retweet this and make sure they get fired."
      - AnIrishDuck 14y ago
        I think that the PyCon staff would have been a better group to escalate to, not a 9000 person mob (one of whom presumably did the intelligent thing and notified the staff)
      - moistgorilla 14y ago
        I said this in another post and I'm going to repeat myself here. Social media is powerful (look at the recent Steubenville fiasco) and if you are going to put somebody out to hang you better be right. Considering she is part of the pr group for her company (developer evangelist?) I believe she has an understanding of what a twitter account with 9000 followers can do. >Isn't this exactly what happened though? Also, don't try to play with words, she did that and more. The sensible response would have been to tell them to stop and then if they didn't, contact one of the staff. A post on twitter saying "Conference etiquette: Sexual innuendos about forking and dongles are not cool" without a picture would have been much MUCH more tasteful.
- WatchDog 14y ago
  I would take issue with it, I think the sane course of action would be to either ignore it, or to ask the people in question to refrain from further innuendo. If they continue to make the jokes then more drastic action like removing them from the event might be appropriate.
SODaniel 14y ago
Not being able to make sexually explicit jokes in private at a public conference is absolute ludicrous. No question that the offender here is the person posting this out of context and seemingly out of spite.
- numbsafari 14y ago
  If you don't understand that there's no expectation of privacy when sitting in a crowded audience at a conference ... then you probably shouldn't be trusted to represent a company at a conference.
- wpietri 14y ago
  This was not in private. Their mouths were, what, two feet from the ears in front of them?
  - angersock 14y ago
    Do try and see past the simple physics of the situation--it's clear that they expected any leakage in their message passing to be ignored.
    - wpietri 14y ago
      I agree they had that expectation. But that's the problem. There are situations where they'd know it's not ok to make sexual jokes. They would not be making these jokes at a funeral, or at a niece's dance recital, or over dinner with their grandmothers. Note also that they were in conversation with Adira seconds before they made the joke, so it's not entirely clear to me that they could even reasonably expect that they be ignored.
  - newnewnew 14y ago
    For a diverse, pluralistic civil society to work people need to have thick skins. Especially at remarks not directed at them. Otherwise we have an overclass who has the power to police the conduct of an underclass.
- 14y ago
codesuela 14y ago
Are you seriously suggesting the code of conduct applies to PRIVATE conversations between TWO people who obviously know each other? It is not like they meant to offend somebody. I am assuming they weren't talking loudly but rather meant to converse between each other. How I talk to my buddy is no ones fucking business. How about you tell your friend of of those an American, a Russian and a German walk into a bar jokes, someone overhears it, snaps a picture and announces to his twitter following what a xenophobic asshole you are?
- danilocampos 14y ago
  If it were private, it wouldn't have happened with people nearby to hear it and the photo wouldn't have depicted dozens of people surrounding.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - paganel 14y ago
    So you're saying "private" is not in fact, well, "private". I grew up as a kid on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain, in Eastern Europe, where as it happens walls had ears and "private" was not in fact "private". To see this stuff repeating 25 years later in the free world is scary.
    - awj 14y ago
      How on earth can you expect privacy in a conversation that people literally cannot help but overhear? This was a crowd of people in an audience either waiting for or listening to a presentation.
    - mistercow 14y ago
      Yes, that's right. A privately run conference asking attendees to behave professionally around other attendees is exactly like the KGB, and is a sure sign that we are sliding downward into totalitarianism.
jvp 14y ago
You are "acquainted" with Adria and appeared "together" on a "panel"?! I'm offended and do not appreciate jokes of that nature.
niggler 14y ago
"the fact that this guy's employer made a kneejerk reaction is no one's fault but the employer." Exactly. Let's direct our questions first at the employer. What she did wasn't exactly the coolest thing in the world, but she wasn't the one who fired the guy -- his employer did. I also dont get the sense that she wanted to really punish the guy; rather, she wanted to call out the practice.
- lizzard 14y ago
  Exactly. We need to be able to call out bad practices. People deny doing this stuff, they say we should report it, they say we should report it non-anonymously. Sadly every time we do... the same thing happens as a result.
- camelite 14y ago
  This is argument ad vacua (I made that up). That is, if the employer fired the guy was living in vacuum where public relations, sexual harassment suits or the feminist movement's message entire had had no impact whatsoever on their decision, and further posited that employers in general care more about treating their employees with objective fairness than any potential threat to their reputation.... then perhaps you could isolate the fault to the employer. But that's simply not the world we operate in and even then you are discounting the ramifications of being publicly denouncement for anybody else the guy knows or will know in the future. There's plenty of blame to go around.
revelation 14y ago
Their code of conduct also states that you may not take pictures of people without their express consent. I don't know why people concentrate on the issue of "who said what", that is such an extremely slippery slope I wouldn't dare going into it as a conference organizer. But taking pictures (and then spreading them to your followers) is a very, very clear no go.
- AnIrishDuck 14y ago
  I think this point is key. There's plenty of blame on both sides here. Yes, these kinds of jokes are immature and this conduct was ill advised. That said, taking ambush pictures of nonconsenting parties and very publicly shaming them shouldn't be your go-to response. I'd say that response was completely disproportionate to the initial crime. Far better to throw an (in person) "come on guys, be professional" their way and escalate from there. If that's too confrontational for your tastes, go talk to one of the PyCon volunteers and ask them to step in. I think it's kind of ridiculous that they (PyCon staff) didn't get a chance to resolve this issue discretely and had to hear about it alongside however many thousand other people.
  - takluyver 14y ago
    It appears that PyCon staff did handle the incident, and did so sensibly and discretely: http://pycon.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/pycon-response-to-inappropriate.html http://pycon.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/pycon-response-to-inappr... It's not clear whether that happened before or after the photo was posted. Edit: the code of conduct also says "Public shaming can be counter-productive to building a strong community. PyCon does not condone nor participate in such actions out of respect."
    - xymostech 14y ago
      She took the picture before she got the pycon people involved. You can tell because of the times on her tweets. The picture was tweeted at 10:32, and she started calling for the pycon staff at 10:34.
josh-j 14y ago
"Sexism is not at issue here." I got the impression reading Adria's blog post that she thought she was responding to sexism. Sexism is what most everyone is responding to in this event -- real or imagined. The problem is that the way Adria responded, in part, harmed people that didn't deserve harm (and if they did deserve it, it shouldn't be up to her to mete it out -- which by taking it public she is effectively doing). She should have kept their identities anonymous unless it was necessary to do otherwise. In a culture that strives to be politically correct (no negative connotation intended), any egalitarian issue can be wielded like a weapon. I think Adria was aware of that, and so I think she deserves a fair amount of blame for the events that followed her actions.
newnewnew 14y ago
Every closed society needs its secret police. In the PC world, you stay in line or you are fired, shunned, silenced and ostracized.
crag 14y ago
"From PyCon's code of conduct:" Wait a minute. We're talking common sense here. Simply turning your head saying "You two mind?" Probably would've settled the affair right there. They weren't insulting her personally. Just two guys exchanging stupid childish jokes. Where they in bad taste? Certainly. And Adria obviously considered them offensive. But did they (the guys) deserve the drama that's unfolded? Certainly not. And frankly, I find it offensive that she's pulling out all the stops in justifying her actions. She quite proud of herself, isn't she?
MBlume 14y ago
> First – the fact that this guy's employer made a kneejerk reaction is no one's fault but the employer. This. Why isn't the employer in question's name front and center here? Aside from any attempt to punish them, people should just know that they're not a safe place to work, that they'll sacrifice one of their own out of fear.
smegel 14y ago
Wasnt it a private conversation? The code of conduct covered talks and other public communication. This was a gross invasion of privacy and damaging slander.
smegel 14y ago
Wasnt it a private conversation? The code of conduct covered talks and other public communication. This was a gross invasion of privacy and damaging slander.
rdtsc 14y ago
So you'd agree that Adria shouldn't be allowed to PyCon next year since she posted face pictures of attendees (and sponsors) and then called them 'ass clowns'? This is not just about PyCon that is for the whole world to see. Future employees, these guys' kids, family, friends. Is that acceptable you think? I also think there is space here for PSF to also issue an explicit statement regarding public humiliation and posting face pictures of attendees with slanderous and insulting captions. It is about free speech and all, and maybe if she caught them in lobby without their badges on it might have been OK. If anything this damaged PyCon's reputation. I don't want to go anymore as much. I keep my mouth shut anyway, but what if I say something wrong, or look at someone the wrong way -- now my picture with my badge and an insult is plastered over twitter. That is the definition of a hostile environment, no matter what gender, color, sexual orientation.
hazov 14y ago
The fact that someone post photos of others to her twitter's followers is also no one's fault but your friend, this along with the dick joke triggered everything, it was a poor decision making just like telling dick jokes in the middle of the crowd, I do give her the benefit of doubt believing she intended no harm, but something happened and now a guy have no job, I think at least should acknowledge that.
ebbv 14y ago
Yes his employer did make a bad decision, but it was prompted by Adria's bad decision. They both need to apologize. Part of being an adult is not flipping out every time you overhear someone else say something you don't like. And yes I would qualify snapping someone's picture and posting it on Twitter to launch a smear campaign against them as "flipping out".

peterhunt 14y ago

I don't think anyone takes issue with talking to the PyCon organizers and even having them removed from the conference. The employer made a mistake for sure, but so did your friend. Skewering someone in public on the Internet like that is immature and irresponsible. There are a million better ways she could have dealt with this.

lukeman 14y ago
> I don't think anyone takes issue with talking to the PyCon organizers and even having them removed from the conference. They were not removed from the conference.
- peterhunt 14y ago
  Oops! My point was that had stayed within PyCon it would not have been an issue (or at least not as big of one).
djcapelis 14y ago
> Skewering someone in public on the Internet like that is immature and irresponsible. There are a million better ways she could have dealt with this. I'm pretty sure relating and disclosing a situation that happened in a public place fully to the best of her ability shouldn't be something we call irresponsible. In fact, women who do otherwise are often asked to disclose in exactly the manner she did. No matter how a woman chooses to address something like this, there's always someone who wants to talk about how she should have addressed it differently.
- peterhunt 14y ago
  This is not about her being a woman. This is about responsibly dealing with a situation. "Exactly the manner she did?" No one has ever been asked to disclose a photo with faces on Twitter to 9k followers. The right thing to do is either deal with the person directly or escalate above them, whether you're a woman or not. Going straight to the mob is never the right answer.
  - paranoiacblack 14y ago
    > The right thing to do is either deal with the person directly or escalate above them, whether you're a woman or not. Going straight to the mob is never the right answer. Isn't this exactly what happened though? She posted on her feed and asked if someone could speak to them and the Pycon officials saw her post and did exactly that. You're treating this as if she posted on her feed something like, "Can the people who employed these guys please fire them? Also, I want each of my followers to retweet this and make sure they get fired."
    - AnIrishDuck 14y ago
      I think that the PyCon staff would have been a better group to escalate to, not a 9000 person mob (one of whom presumably did the intelligent thing and notified the staff)
    - moistgorilla 14y ago
      I said this in another post and I'm going to repeat myself here. Social media is powerful (look at the recent Steubenville fiasco) and if you are going to put somebody out to hang you better be right. Considering she is part of the pr group for her company (developer evangelist?) I believe she has an understanding of what a twitter account with 9000 followers can do. >Isn't this exactly what happened though? Also, don't try to play with words, she did that and more. The sensible response would have been to tell them to stop and then if they didn't, contact one of the staff. A post on twitter saying "Conference etiquette: Sexual innuendos about forking and dongles are not cool" without a picture would have been much MUCH more tasteful.
WatchDog 14y ago
I would take issue with it, I think the sane course of action would be to either ignore it, or to ask the people in question to refrain from further innuendo. If they continue to make the jokes then more drastic action like removing them from the event might be appropriate.

SODaniel 14y ago

Not being able to make sexually explicit jokes in private at a public conference is absolute ludicrous. No question that the offender here is the person posting this out of context and seemingly out of spite.

numbsafari 14y ago
If you don't understand that there's no expectation of privacy when sitting in a crowded audience at a conference ... then you probably shouldn't be trusted to represent a company at a conference.
wpietri 14y ago
This was not in private. Their mouths were, what, two feet from the ears in front of them?
- angersock 14y ago
  Do try and see past the simple physics of the situation--it's clear that they expected any leakage in their message passing to be ignored.
  - wpietri 14y ago
    I agree they had that expectation. But that's the problem. There are situations where they'd know it's not ok to make sexual jokes. They would not be making these jokes at a funeral, or at a niece's dance recital, or over dinner with their grandmothers. Note also that they were in conversation with Adira seconds before they made the joke, so it's not entirely clear to me that they could even reasonably expect that they be ignored.
- newnewnew 14y ago
  For a diverse, pluralistic civil society to work people need to have thick skins. Especially at remarks not directed at them. Otherwise we have an overclass who has the power to police the conduct of an underclass.
14y ago

codesuela 14y ago

Are you seriously suggesting the code of conduct applies to PRIVATE conversations between TWO people who obviously know each other? It is not like they meant to offend somebody. I am assuming they weren't talking loudly but rather meant to converse between each other. How I talk to my buddy is no ones fucking business. How about you tell your friend of of those an American, a Russian and a German walk into a bar jokes, someone overhears it, snaps a picture and announces to his twitter following what a xenophobic asshole you are?

danilocampos 14y ago
If it were private, it wouldn't have happened with people nearby to hear it and the photo wouldn't have depicted dozens of people surrounding.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- paganel 14y ago
  So you're saying "private" is not in fact, well, "private". I grew up as a kid on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain, in Eastern Europe, where as it happens walls had ears and "private" was not in fact "private". To see this stuff repeating 25 years later in the free world is scary.
  - awj 14y ago
    How on earth can you expect privacy in a conversation that people literally cannot help but overhear? This was a crowd of people in an audience either waiting for or listening to a presentation.
  - mistercow 14y ago
    Yes, that's right. A privately run conference asking attendees to behave professionally around other attendees is exactly like the KGB, and is a sure sign that we are sliding downward into totalitarianism.

jvp 14y ago

You are "acquainted" with Adria and appeared "together" on a "panel"?! I'm offended and do not appreciate jokes of that nature.

niggler 14y ago

"the fact that this guy's employer made a kneejerk reaction is no one's fault but the employer." Exactly. Let's direct our questions first at the employer. What she did wasn't exactly the coolest thing in the world, but she wasn't the one who fired the guy -- his employer did. I also dont get the sense that she wanted to really punish the guy; rather, she wanted to call out the practice.

lizzard 14y ago
Exactly. We need to be able to call out bad practices. People deny doing this stuff, they say we should report it, they say we should report it non-anonymously. Sadly every time we do... the same thing happens as a result.
camelite 14y ago
This is argument ad vacua (I made that up). That is, if the employer fired the guy was living in vacuum where public relations, sexual harassment suits or the feminist movement's message entire had had no impact whatsoever on their decision, and further posited that employers in general care more about treating their employees with objective fairness than any potential threat to their reputation.... then perhaps you could isolate the fault to the employer. But that's simply not the world we operate in and even then you are discounting the ramifications of being publicly denouncement for anybody else the guy knows or will know in the future. There's plenty of blame to go around.

revelation 14y ago

Their code of conduct also states that you may not take pictures of people without their express consent. I don't know why people concentrate on the issue of "who said what", that is such an extremely slippery slope I wouldn't dare going into it as a conference organizer. But taking pictures (and then spreading them to your followers) is a very, very clear no go.

AnIrishDuck 14y ago
I think this point is key. There's plenty of blame on both sides here. Yes, these kinds of jokes are immature and this conduct was ill advised. That said, taking ambush pictures of nonconsenting parties and very publicly shaming them shouldn't be your go-to response. I'd say that response was completely disproportionate to the initial crime. Far better to throw an (in person) "come on guys, be professional" their way and escalate from there. If that's too confrontational for your tastes, go talk to one of the PyCon volunteers and ask them to step in. I think it's kind of ridiculous that they (PyCon staff) didn't get a chance to resolve this issue discretely and had to hear about it alongside however many thousand other people.
- takluyver 14y ago
  It appears that PyCon staff did handle the incident, and did so sensibly and discretely: http://pycon.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/pycon-response-to-inappropriate.html http://pycon.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/pycon-response-to-inappr... It's not clear whether that happened before or after the photo was posted. Edit: the code of conduct also says "Public shaming can be counter-productive to building a strong community. PyCon does not condone nor participate in such actions out of respect."
  - xymostech 14y ago
    She took the picture before she got the pycon people involved. You can tell because of the times on her tweets. The picture was tweeted at 10:32, and she started calling for the pycon staff at 10:34.

josh-j 14y ago

"Sexism is not at issue here." I got the impression reading Adria's blog post that she thought she was responding to sexism. Sexism is what most everyone is responding to in this event -- real or imagined. The problem is that the way Adria responded, in part, harmed people that didn't deserve harm (and if they did deserve it, it shouldn't be up to her to mete it out -- which by taking it public she is effectively doing). She should have kept their identities anonymous unless it was necessary to do otherwise. In a culture that strives to be politically correct (no negative connotation intended), any egalitarian issue can be wielded like a weapon. I think Adria was aware of that, and so I think she deserves a fair amount of blame for the events that followed her actions.

newnewnew 14y ago

Every closed society needs its secret police. In the PC world, you stay in line or you are fired, shunned, silenced and ostracized.

crag 14y ago

"From PyCon's code of conduct:" Wait a minute. We're talking common sense here. Simply turning your head saying "You two mind?" Probably would've settled the affair right there. They weren't insulting her personally. Just two guys exchanging stupid childish jokes. Where they in bad taste? Certainly. And Adria obviously considered them offensive. But did they (the guys) deserve the drama that's unfolded? Certainly not. And frankly, I find it offensive that she's pulling out all the stops in justifying her actions. She quite proud of herself, isn't she?

MBlume 14y ago

> First – the fact that this guy's employer made a kneejerk reaction is no one's fault but the employer. This. Why isn't the employer in question's name front and center here? Aside from any attempt to punish them, people should just know that they're not a safe place to work, that they'll sacrifice one of their own out of fear.

smegel 14y ago

Wasnt it a private conversation? The code of conduct covered talks and other public communication. This was a gross invasion of privacy and damaging slander.

smegel 14y ago

Wasnt it a private conversation? The code of conduct covered talks and other public communication. This was a gross invasion of privacy and damaging slander.

rdtsc 14y ago

So you'd agree that Adria shouldn't be allowed to PyCon next year since she posted face pictures of attendees (and sponsors) and then called them 'ass clowns'? This is not just about PyCon that is for the whole world to see. Future employees, these guys' kids, family, friends. Is that acceptable you think? I also think there is space here for PSF to also issue an explicit statement regarding public humiliation and posting face pictures of attendees with slanderous and insulting captions. It is about free speech and all, and maybe if she caught them in lobby without their badges on it might have been OK. If anything this damaged PyCon's reputation. I don't want to go anymore as much. I keep my mouth shut anyway, but what if I say something wrong, or look at someone the wrong way -- now my picture with my badge and an insult is plastered over twitter. That is the definition of a hostile environment, no matter what gender, color, sexual orientation.

hazov 14y ago

The fact that someone post photos of others to her twitter's followers is also no one's fault but your friend, this along with the dick joke triggered everything, it was a poor decision making just like telling dick jokes in the middle of the crowd, I do give her the benefit of doubt believing she intended no harm, but something happened and now a guy have no job, I think at least should acknowledge that.

ebbv 14y ago

Yes his employer did make a bad decision, but it was prompted by Adria's bad decision. They both need to apologize. Part of being an adult is not flipping out every time you overhear someone else say something you don't like. And yes I would qualify snapping someone's picture and posting it on Twitter to launch a smear campaign against them as "flipping out".