Women and TLUG - a personal rant

Matt Seburn mattseburn-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org
Thu Jan 16 16:01:52 UTC 2014


This thread is absurd to me.  Count me as one of those put off enough by
what I see here to consider TLUG utterly useless.

I attended one meeting years ago, and felt so unwelcome that I haven't been
back since.  Heckling was an issue, but I chose not to come back because
the group felt very unwelcoming.  It felt like I had walked into a clique
of people who had known each other for years and had no interest in letting
newcomers into the group.  I tried to follow along to the post-meeting
social time (hoping that I'd have better luck socializing there), but
everyone walked ahead of me and occasionally looked back to glare at me
until I gave up and left.  I'm sure I'm not the only one who has had an
experience like this.

I stayed on the list because of the useful and interesting discussion, but
now I'm reconsidering that decision.  I see a group of people condoning
sexual harassment, and prioritizing the harasser's "right" to harass above
others' right to not be harassed.  This is absurd to me.  Free speech does
not mean you have the right to say whatever you want without consequences.
You can't yell "fire!" in a crowded theatre, and you can't sexually harass
people.  Both actions can and often do have serious consequences, and for
good reason.

Moderation is an important part of any internet community.  I agree that
the banhammer should be used sparingly, but at a minimum the moderator's
role is to set the tone and ensure that the space remains useful for its
intended purpose, and in TLUG's case this extends to in-person meetups.
Many people in this thread have shared that they feel the group has become
problematic and is not useful to them.  I think this is a real problem that
those in charge of TLUG need to pay attention to.

If you want to get together with your friends and heckle each other and
make sexist jokes, you are free to do so whenever and wherever you like.
That is not the purpose of TLUG, and it's the responsibility of those in
charge to ensure it remains true to its purpose.

Matt



On Thu, Jan 16, 2014 at 6:19 AM, Colin McGregor <colin.mc151-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org>wrote:

> On Wed, Jan 15, 2014 at 9:37 PM, Stewart C. Russell <scruss-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org>wrote:
>
>> On 14-01-15 07:53 PM, William Park wrote:
>> >
>> > Come on, guys.  This bitching about TLUG meeting is strange to me and
>> > counter productive as group.
>>
>> Actually, no; it's very productive to constructively criticize something
>> you want to see improve. In the link that Colin posted, it's written up
>> under “Geek Social Fallacy #2: Friends Accept Me As I Am”:
>> http://www.plausiblydeniable.com/opinion/gsf.html
>> — read it, it's good.
>>
>
> Sorry, my bad, I first heard about the Geek Social Fallacy article via
> Stewart Russell on Monday, and I didn't credit him. Bottom line though,
> there are points in that article that should be driven home to a GTALug
> (and several other geek groups) audience (sad but true).
>
> I often attend the GTALug board meetings, even though I am not a board
> member. It is my hope that at the next board meeting GTALug will adopt a
> formal code of conduct and then be prepared to enforce the code...
>
> So, while I know the TLUG directors have tried their best, I have to say
>> that the new room at Ryerson is definitely sub-standard. In the days of
>> pretending to be associated with UofT, at least the rooms were big
>> enough that the annoying back-channel chatter didn't prevent you from
>> hearing everything.
>>
>> > People come to the meeting because they
>> > want to learning something, and people don't come to the meeting because
>> > they have nothing to learn.
>>
>> While TLUG has a roster of genuine subject matter experts who are a joy
>> to listen to, there are a number of folks at meetings who - maybe - just
>> come to give their 2¢ on whatever topic is being presented. I understand
>> that it's sometimes hard to contain one's natural exuberance about
>> sharing knowledge, but it's better to be kind than correct, so we should
>> strive to remember that a presenter is just giving their experience of
>> their way of running their system. It may be vastly different from the
>> way we'd do it, but if it works, good!
>>
>>  Stewart
>>
>> (who may have occasionally used “cat file | …”, but is yet to run out of
>> processes to do so)
>> --
>> The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
>> TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
>> How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists
>>
>
>
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