At least part of the reason I go to Pycon is for recruiting; that means that I wear a company-branded t-shirt, and -- obviously -- my name tag has my company's name on it. I expect that I should always behave in a way that is consistent with representing my company well, and part of that means keeping my conduct strictly professional.

I don't see anything here that makes Pycon less useful, or interesting, or relevant to me, nor do I see any action on the part of the Pycon folks that I disagree with. And, having just talked with my management last night about Donglegate, I know they feel the same.

Now, Pycon being in Montreal is a different matter -- I don't really want to cross borders for Pycon.

Or you know - click on the provided links?

It will also put me off talking freely and in an unguarded manner in front of female attendees at any conference.

Which will make these women notice the subconscious cues that they are unwanted and unwelcome because of what Adria Richards did, leading to a drop in women attendees, which people like Adria Richards will then blame on the overbearing masculinity of the leadership until the leaders are expelled for their non-existent problem with women so that people loyal to Adria Richards can take over the group. The fake feminists did the exact same thing to the atheist community. [dreamwidth.org]

My thoughts too. What the fuck is submitter talking about?

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=donglegate [lmgtfy.com]

Basically, a nosy bitch at a tech conference overheard two guys make a "dongle" joke (and possibly a "forking" joke), and instead of acting like an adult and ignoring them or asking them to stop, or even complaining privately to the conference organizers, she took their picture, and tweeted it to the world.

Guys were kicked out, one was fired from his job. Upon hearing this, certain parts of the Interwebs that shall remain nameless (okay, it was 4chan) started DDOSing her site and the site of her employer. She ended up being fired herself.

Sheesh.

Actually I think she knew exactly what would happen, the same thing as always, people rape threatning her and calling her all kind of things. Amanda Blum's excelent blog post [wordpress.com] highlights the problem with Adrias behaviour but hopefully give you some insight to the larger problem.

If this has thought us something it is that there are some serious problem with sexism at tech conferences, even if you don't like what she did the backlash kind of proved her point IMHO.

I'm not sure what the "naughty Montreal" comment is about; Montreal is an ideal location to get over this episode. Women in general, and women in industry in particular, are treated fairly and equitably. While there aren't 50% female developers, the numbers are higher than I've seen elsewhere in North America.

I just hope conference attendees are ready for 51% of the sessions to be held in French, and all printed materials being predominantly in French, as required by law.

Informative link.

"Money Shot" does not mean porn. Yes. Porn made the term famous, but the meaning isn't quite "semen being ejected." It's "this is what people came here to see!" Steve Jobs holding up a new iThing was "the money shot."

The woman has a serious problem in that she makes her problem a problem for everyone else.

Very enlightening.

She was not going to be re-trained. And the blogger demonstrated that she has a history of choosing the stir up trouble rather than trying to work things out. Clearly the company that fired her made the right choice.

I'm rather surprised she even attended PyCon. After all, pythons and snakes in general are often used to describe penises.

...almost certainly equivalent to one she clearly has no problems with [twitter.com].

Interesting Twitter feed, as it were, full of sexism and racism.

But of course, it doesn't count - because she's black and female. And joking, clearly, oh, certainly.

There are plenty...'idiot' works for me. If you want extra strength, 'nasty, hypocritical attention-seeking idiot' would seem to apply in this case.
Why do you feel the need for something gender-specific?

Note that you can just as well call a female a 'bastard' if you like, it's just slang for 'illegitimate'.

Strangely enough, just about the stongest word you can use against a man in the English language is of course 'cunt'; go figure.

Overall, though, swear word tends to detract from the overall message. I once worked for a boss that I never, ever heard use a swer word.
But when he (rarely) felt he had to, he could take verbally take people to pieces like I've never seen.

Now get off my fucking lawn.

Once a bitch always a bitch. Here's some backstory [wordpress.com] on the problem told from the perspective of a decent and respectable woman.

She wasn't eavesdropping.

Avdi Grimm [google.com] said it best:

One other comment to address a bizarre accusation of hypocrisy that's come up a few times. If you cannot tell the difference between:

- someone tweeting a dick joke on their personal Twitter account, and;

- someone making a dick joke...
- ...while attending a tech industry conference
- ...that has a Code of Conduct
- ...as a representative of a sponsor
- ...while sitting in the middle of a crowded auditorium
- ...during a talk that others are trying to listen to
- ...but still loudly enough to be overheard ...if you seriously cannot identify any difference between those two scenarios, I really don't know if I have enough clue to help you. I can check the back room but in those quantities we'll probably have to back-order it.

I can understand the "overreaction" argument. But the "she's a hypocrite because she tweets dick jokes" argument just doesn't even get off the ground. Nor does "she was eavesdropping on a private conversation".

If that doesn't help, how about Richards' own blog post:

What I will share with you here is the backstory that led to this –

The guy behind me to the far left was saying he didn’t find much value from the logging session that day. I agreed with him so I turned around and said so. He then went onto say that an earlier session he’d been to where the speaker was talking about images and visualization with Python was really good, even if it seemed to him the speaker wasn’t really an expert on images. He said he would be interested in forking the repo and continuing development.

That would have been fine until the guy next to him

began making sexual forking jokes

I'll make this real simple: the PlayHaven guys weren't making private jokes, they were responding inappropriately to public comments.

I posted a bunch of details here [slashdot.org] but the main point is :

Richards had pissed off people by pulling similar publicity stunts before [wordpress.com]. Amanda Blum was one of those people Richard had pissed off. She sent a constructive email to SendGrid suggesting how one keeps such loose cannons under control. SendGrid simply read Blum's email as past behavior and fired Richards rather than taking Blum's constructive advice.

It's worth noting that Richard actions constitute libel in the U.K. I donno if her accusation of the forking remark constitute libel in the U.S., perhaps given that it's false. I'd assume that her accusation of the dongles remark does not constitute libel in the U.S., being true.

Pycon put out a statement that it was regrettable somebody was oversensitive and overreacted to something mildly offensive.

Well they did update their code of conduct to disallow public shaming of anyone.

That under these particular circumstances it might have been best if the offended party had expressed the fact that she was offended directly to those offending her (as they were not the least bit threatening) or perhaps escalated it to Pycon security.

She did inform the organisers. They privately dealt with it, the jokers sincerely apologised, and the organisers left it at that. The tweeting of their photo was in addition to that.

I can't fault the PyCon organisers for anything in this. If anything, they now have a more robust code of conduct now. Future events should hopefully be free of any of this nonsense.

We need to attract women like Adria because of their immense tech skills

http://butyoureagirl.com/14015/forking-and-dongle-jokes-dont-belong-at-tech-conferences/ [butyoureagirl.com]

No wait, we need to attract them because of their superior people skills. Like tweeting a picture of someone and getting them fired over a stupid comment because they were too passive to confront them and too aggressive to just let it slide and then making up a bullshit but-think-of-the-children justification to make it seem like they were doing it for some higher purpose than self promotion.