[Noisebridge-discuss] [drama] I got groped at noisebridge at hackmeet

[Liz Henry]

Ronald, I would argue that the fact that Noisebridge deals with its
problems by airing them out in a transparent way, discussing the issues
and responding to things in a non-centralized way, is exactly why we are
a good and functional community.  Undesirable things happen everywhere,
but they are often hushed up or covered up and nothing is done about the
underlying problems.

For example, kickbanning Patrick within 1 day of his harassing behavior
was pretty amazing.  It was not fun, and the community was damaged by
it, but the fact that someone behave badly wasn't something determined
by our structure and wasn't really controllable. It is how we dealt with
the problem that matters. Not everything about the process was great,
but we were figuring out what to do was we went, in response to how
events unfolded and how information spread throughout our community. I
thought that it was, on the whole, a good response.

If we as an organization never, ever called anyone out or held them
responsible for crossing some sort of behavior line, then I would worry
a lot more.

So, Ronald, here I think you are conflating *having to deal with
problems*, which every community has, with *how we respond to those
problems*.  Can you really think of an organization which doesn't have
conflict? We do a good portion of it in public.   While this makes some
people label us as the drama-y hackerspace, actually, I bet the others
have (and I KNOW some of them have) personal and political conflict that
is kept more private.  That is not necessarily an unalloyed good.


- Liz


On 10/21/12 8:12 PM, Ronald Cotoni wrote:
> To be honest, this incident and others that have happened in the past (the
> patrick keys stuff, rob 2.0, theft of the donation box recently), it seems
> that noisebridge needs a wake up call to the real world.  We have all these
> things that happen that could have been avoided in hindsight.   I think
> Noisebridge and it's members (I would be a member but I was blocked 1 hour
> before the 4th meeting), need to do something before Noisebridge is at risk
> from some stupidity that happens in the space.
> 
> At this point I hope someone does something that will close the space so we
> can pull our collective heads out of our collective asses and make
> Noisebridge the "excellent" space it needs to be.   This is the worst thing
> I have ever said about noisebridge.   I feel really horrible but I would
> feel worse if I told a friend to go there and something unexcelent happened
> to them.   Fix yourself (sooner than later please).
> 



-- 

------------------------
Liz Henry
liz at bookmaniac.org
http://bookmaniac.org

"Without models, it's hard to work; without a context, difficult to
evaluate; without peers, nearly impossible to speak." -- Joanna Russ