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

[Jake]

I agree that fucked up things like this happen everywhere, and the thing 
that is different about noisebridge is that we discuss it, even if it was 
hushed up at the time.  Most places would have simply considered the 
problem solved once the person who was assaulted left the space.

We rightfully seek to do whatever we can (most of us i hope) to make sure 
this never happens again, but the least we can do is learn from it and do 
our best in the future.  That is a lot more than most places would do.

Unfortunately i see a lot of people, as someone put it, demonstrating 
vividly how clueless most geeks (males in particular) are when it comes to 
dealing with oppressive behavior against women.  Cluelessness is one 
thing, but perhaps because a lot of people were put on the defensive by 
the original post, a lot of people never got to the point of listening, 
learning, and then asking the right questions.

A lot of people jumped to the "hey i didn't do it" phase,  which is, 
importantly, not what needed to be said at the time.

(or worse, the "are you sure it happened?" phase, a question you should 
keep to yourself, because as Rachel pointed out, someone wouldn't bring it 
up if they didn't think it happened.  So you're accusing them of lying.)

I think what we all needed to say (and some did) was, "i'm really sorry 
this happened to you anywhere, and it is not something that is at all 
acceptable at our space.  I or any number of people here are always 
available to help mediate any conflicts including what happened to you, 
and while it may not have helped you on saturday, we all strive to be 
available for anyone who needs help calling out abusive or oppressive 
behavior.  If you have any suggestions for us of what we can do for you 
now, or changes we can make in the space in general, we are all ears."

-jake

Liz wrote:

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