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On Nov 26, 2012, at 5:16 PM, Bess Sadler wrote: >> Why have an official anti-harassment policy for your conference? First, it is necessary (unfortunately). Harassment at conferences is incredibly common - for example, see this timeline (http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/index.php?title=Timeline_of_incidents) of sexist incidents in geek communities. Second, it sets expectations for behavior at the conference. Simply having an anti-harassment policy can prevent harassment all by itself. Third, it encourages people to attend who have had bad experiences at other conferences. Finally, it gives conference staff instructions on how to handle harassment quickly, with the minimum amount of disruption or bad press for your conference. > > If the conference already has something like this in place, and I'm just uninformed, please educate me and let's do a better job publicizing it. > > Thanks for considering this suggestion. If the answer is the usual code4lib answer (some variation on "Great idea! How are you going to make that happen?") then I hereby nominate myself as a member of the Anti-Harrassment Policy Adoption committee for the code4lib conference. Would anyone else like to join me? We had no Anti-Harassment Policy for the DC-Baltimore Perl Workshop as it was all covered under our general Code of Conduct: Don't be an asshole. I think there was a second line of it, about how we had the right to remove people who refused to follow that advice and no refunds would be given. I might be wrong on the exact language. The e-mail I found referenced 'Don't be a dick', in an attempt to paraphrase the legalese of the Code of Conduct for our venue ... but the reference to gender-specific anatomy would be kinda sexist in itself. -Joe