Women and TLUG - a personal rant

[William Witteman]

It has been a long time since I was at a GTALug meeting, but I
definitely contributed negatively to the experience in two ways that I
suspect are still going on:

1. I saw some pretty disruptive heckling of the presenter, and I said
nothing.  I was annoyed at the heckler, and the presentation was badly
derailed by the heckling, but I still didn't feel like I had the
social standing in the group to say anything.  Unchecked heckling of a
presenter creates an atmosphere where social faux pas are tolerated,
and one person's social faux pas can easily be harassment to another.

2. Whispering during the presentation - I was whispering quietly to a
friend during the presentation, and while I made an effort to be
quiet, I was unable to render myself either silent or invisible.  It
is a rude practice, and I am embarrassed that I did it.  There are
ample ways available now for maintaining back-channel communications
during a talk, but if you are going to use them you need to be
unobtrusive.  There are studies that show that laptop use by some
people in a lecture hall lower retention scores for the whole room.
Laptop use at a GTALug meeting is probably normal and acceptable, even
encouraged, but it should be balanced with professional courtesy and
social grace.

In the intervening years I have come to the opinion that waiting for
someone with more social standing to call out rude or harassing
behaviour is a mistake.  Everyone needs to politely defend everyone
else's right to a courteous environment.

On 15 January 2014 12:16, Colin McGregor <colin.mc151-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> Last month Renata Rocha raised some very legit concerns regarding harassment
> at GTALug meetings. While this isn't a direct tie into that, here is part of
> the issue : http://www.plausiblydeniable.com/opinion/gsf.html .
>
> Basically we as geeks tend to make social mistakes that are ... different
> from, but in some way just as serious (or arguably more serious) than
> "mainstream" groups. Bottom line, these are issues we need to be aware of,
> and from there we can start thinking about how to deal these said issues.
>
>
> Colin McGregor
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