As a Mexican who has seen our beaches gradually destroyed by endless visiting cruise ships year after year, I feel compelled to remind people how terrible they are for the planet.
Not to mention, they are also super legally sleazy. They are often harboured at countries that have no legal protections. If something happens to you on a cruise ship, it's your own damn problem. Being registered in those tiny corrupt countries also means that they don't have to answer for their ecological destruction.
I wish I could be excited about going to such an event. It seems like it would be super fun. But I don't want my fun to promote such evils. I am very saddened by the coral reef destruction I have witnessed first hand throughout my life.
This is the coolest thing I've seen in a while when it comes to conference. As someone with a young family, I cringe when I have to think about going to another city for a conference, which is all the time because I live in Cleveland. Its not the travel, I rather like traveling: its leaving the wife with the kids and just up and going. This allows me to take the kids and wife, and not feel too bad about abandoning them to fend for themselves for a week.
This is exactly why I'm organizing it. I have two kids (and a husband who likes to have me around), and it's always a bit of chaos when I leave for a conference.
Thanks for organizing it! Ill get with my wife, but this seems very affordable and fun event in particular for a family of four its the same cost as a normal "large" conference ticket and those don't include all you can eat food and daycare.
My kids both love the programs available, and they go all the way up to 17. For the teens, the format is about hanging out, and for the older teens, they even have exclusive excursions.
Pretty cool. Ever since going solo I've wondered why more development conferences aren't in tropical locations so it can double as a vacation :-)
I worked at an agency that did work for pharmaceutical companies and doctors/med salespeople do this all the time! There were a couple of jobs in Punta Cana, DR alone each year.
There was such a company for a while; I spoke on the first two "Geek Cruises," which has since re-dubbed itself "Insight Cruises" (http://insightcruises.com/). I'm not sure which market forces pushed them in this direction. We managed to see Alaska and the Caribbean, which was super fun.
I must admit that while those cruises were great fun and quite interesting, they showed my wife and me that it's not the kind of vacation or travel that is our style. Lots of other people do enjoy them, though -- and I'm happy to see that someone else is trying this!
The organizer might want to contact the Insight Cruises people; I don't think that they're in direct competition any more, and perhaps they'll have something useful to suggest from their experience.
What, precisely, is the problem with this? The entire code of conduct says "be nice, don't be a douchebag." Openness and inclusion is a great thing, and I'm very proud that more cons are working like this (Clojure/west raised a bunch of money to bring underrepresented groups to the con, which is great).
This is important, to ensure a safe space for women and children. How else are we going to encourage more diversity in tech? For far too long, [we] (http://www.riosmauricio.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Hoppe...) have been a passively tolerant society, saying to our citizens 'as long as you obey the law, we will leave you alone'.
It's fine if you're offended by it - this means you're exactly the sort of developers conferences want to filter.
Raising a good community is extremely challenging, lots of people feel excluded and making an inclusive conference is an extremely challenging task - it's also super important for the atmosphere.
> you're exactly the sort of developers conferences want to filter
I would hope conferences want to filter actual harrassers, not people who feel uneasy about the slight social engineering and censorship undertones of Codes of Conduct.
This is a complex question, don't reduce it to the one dimensional "decent person" angle. If it would be so simple, the CoC would consist of one phrase: "use common sense during communication with others".
I understand and emphasize the need for a comfortable experience for all members of the conference.
However, I'd like to present you and others with a hypothetical scenario. The CoC states "Harassment includes offensive verbal comments related to ... religion...".
Simple and factual statement that scientology is a total sham (this statement can be easily extended towards most organized religions) would put the speaker in violation of the CoC. Does that seem reasonable to you?
Lots of people will spend several days together on a cruise ship. They will get acquainted, exchange opinions, drink, have fun, socialize, discuss various topics they are interested in. Developers are human, you know, not some wet-ware apis limited to development/programming topics.
I expect the remedy in that situation would be to recommend that the speaker and offended person not discuss religion any further. The horror.
I guess it would be harder to deal with for someone giving a talk, but contrive away why it is necessary for a talk about python to make simple factual statements about various religions.
* some health topics (anti-vaxxers, homeopathy, obesity epidemic etc)
* sexual topics (the ultimate transgression)
Do you not understand the possible chilling effects of such policy? Do you not feel that developers should be able to converse and disagree without fear of being labeled as a CoC offender and a non-decent person?
Aren't these reasonable questions? Please respond without straw-man arguments about sexual harassment, as that is only a subset of the CoC
Did I already make a straw man argument about sexual harassment?
I don't think a CoC makes such conversations impossible, interested parties won't be offended. Sure, it could easily go too far, with mild transgressions being reported left and right (ya know, instead of the person just demurring or bowing out of the conversation), but I think it is fair to say that you've then discovered that those aren't reasonable, interesting people to be talking to.
What it does is make it impossible for party A to follow party B around, repeatedly calling their beliefs a sham (notice the follow around and repeatedly) and then defend their behavior as appropriate because their statements were truthful and couth (basically, being an ass and then standing on the ceremony of politeness).
If you don't think the other participants are going to mostly be reasonable and that staff are going to be reasonable about dealing with mild complaints, don't attend!
> I don't think a CoC makes such conversations impossible, interested parties won't be offended.
My experience is that I feel unwelcome at such events. Instead of being able to speak to my peers honestly and openly, instead I make a point to do so as much as possible in a private setting, lest I break some protocol that I'm not even aware of and end up reprimanded as a result.
I mean no offense to anyone, and go out of my way to avoid offending. I'm not seeking permission to do something improper, nor am I ashamed of my words or actions - I'm saying that as a white male, my actions are held to a very different and seemingly arbitrary standard.
There's a reason I post this sort of topic using a separate account. Every conversation I've had with this part of the community has been antagonistic toward me as soon as it is discovered that I'm a member of the racial/gender group that is most heavily disfavored.
>If you don't think the other participants are going to mostly be reasonable and that staff are going to be reasonable about dealing with mild complaints, don't attend!
This should be a wake up call for you to reconsider your position.
"If you don't think the other participants are going to mostly be reasonable and that staff are going to be reasonable about dealing with mild complaints, don't attend!"
Can you guess HN reaction to your comment if you would offer same advice to a woman in the context of "sexist, racist, or exclusionary jokes"?
If there was a statement published by a group making it clear that the intent of the group was to make sexist, racist and exclusionary jokes, I would be perfectly comfortable suggesting that people uncomfortable with the topics should not attend the group.
I might separately be critical of the group for the exercise, but it would be highly contextual and depend on what their aim was.
I can't quite believe I'm being sucked into the vortex of irrationality and tedium that is the "Code of Conduct" debate, but if you cannot see that the various codes of conduct in the F/OSS community obviously go beyond merely labelling racist slurs as inappropriate then I'm not sure how we can move forward.
> saying "don't yell racial epithets" and "don't tell women to make you a sandwich" is not even close to censorship. That's called being a decent person
On paper, diversity and sensitivity is great. I'm a free market capitalist, but the communist manifesto is still the most just draft I've ever read.
However, we don't live in a vacuum.
BSD, perl, c, linux, python, you name it. These projects welcome all and always have. We dont need a code of conduct. We hate how you jinx our cooperation and success.
By the way: Frankly my own black girlfriend loves cooking. I eat together with her family, and we tease each other all the time at the dinner table. Chicken, collared greens, Pepsi.
I've never felt so loved. Instead of tucking my balls between my legs, we laughed like hyenas over wars between our races. Dad was like "gimme my damn food woman!!"
Our dinner was on paper, racist. But our expression brought us closer, and its worth more than 160 characters. Political correctness is a pressure cooker strangling both our families' necks.
Ha! The long version will get MUCH longer once we have the procedures in place. I'm going to need to do some experiments on my upcoming cruise, as well as coordinate with the manager.
Let me see if I understand... You want to be able to say anything you want without repercussions. However, if someone else decides to say what they want in response, that is "blast your pic around the world", you are offended.
So your definition of censorship seems to be: "leting others call me on my bullshit". That is an odd definition.
An outsider who doesn't program Python eaves drops two Python programmers. She interjected, took a photo without permission. Who bullied who?
Outsiders from twitter and political wiki's who don't program try to hijack the discourse of a community on the forefront of diversity. Open source already welcomed programmers. What are we to make of these outsiders?
Codes of conduct are welcome bait for professional victims and attention seekers with no intention of coding.
Would you be convinced if I compiled the statistics in a blog post?
Tech culture is not even close to being on the forefront of diversity. It's a fucking embarrassment, actually. minorities are severely underrepresented in tech, and we need more of them. Diversity, and diversity of viewpoints is a great thing
Look on github at pycon code of conduct. See adria Richards in the logs?
Look up the blog post where they pulled the pycon code of conduct from geekfeminism wiki.
Lives have been ruined, in part because the integrity of these projects are being lost to outside pressures distracting us from accomplishing technical goals.
Python community is and has been open and diverse. We even let non-programmers into them and real programmers have been fired.
If you do support codes of conduct, know that its not needed. Civility is and has always been apart of hacker culture.
We don't care what you look like. We care if you code. We help each other.
All I see that is even remotely related to the dongle incident are the commits like this one, asking attendees to bring issues to the conference staff:
Jesus Christ. My work proxy blocks this page, not the main site, but specifically the coc.html. Can someone paste it into a gist or jsfiddle or something?
I don't understand the issue that someone would have with these words unless they're looking to do something that is prohibited. Is a conservative mindset where they're looking to keep things the way they were? Do they feel that taking the effort to be as inclusive as possible hinders growth? What's the beef?
The poster here seems to legitimately view it as an attack on some sort of perceived group identity, that it is somehow being imposed on them from the outside.
Of course, the people writing the codes of conduct are speaking for themselves, not the perceived group identity mentioned above, and the poster is attempting to speak on behalf of the group they see, probably without carefully apprehending the range of opinions that exist within the group.
I'd also consider the idea that much of the push back is disingenuous sophistry coming from people that enjoy going to conferences and hassling people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cruise_ship#Environmental_impa...
As a Mexican who has seen our beaches gradually destroyed by endless visiting cruise ships year after year, I feel compelled to remind people how terrible they are for the planet.
Not to mention, they are also super legally sleazy. They are often harboured at countries that have no legal protections. If something happens to you on a cruise ship, it's your own damn problem. Being registered in those tiny corrupt countries also means that they don't have to answer for their ecological destruction.
http://www.cracked.com/quick-fixes/3-dark-facts-cruise-lines...
I wish I could be excited about going to such an event. It seems like it would be super fun. But I don't want my fun to promote such evils. I am very saddened by the coral reef destruction I have witnessed first hand throughout my life.
http://www.marineinsight.com/marine/environment/how-ships-ar...
http://notigodinez.com/empresa-constructora-de-muelle-dana-g...