http://sushee.no-ip.org/opensourceisnotawarzone.txt

Open Source Is Not A Warzone. Not Every Man Is A Dick.

We are women of tech. We do Open Source. We are part of Open Source
communities.

We attend tech conferences, usergroups and hackathons along with our
fellow male developers.

And we like it.

We feel the overwhelming majority of men we have to deal with being
any variety of a sensible person - some are even nice guys we like.

Yes, we encountered dicks in our lives. Yes, we have been assaulted in
our lives, maybe in broad daylight, in public. Yes, we've been hit on
tastelessly and repeatedly and we have been disgusted and annoyed and
sometimes we have been near panic. Some of us have encountered
violence. We've gotten grabbed our asses, gotten felt up our boobs,
have been stared at, wolf whistles at us and had some drunken moron
hang in front of us. Yes, some of us have hit the proverbial glass
ceiling in our careers.

This is (a bad) part of our lives and yes, we judge social gathering and
human encounters by how comfortable we are and how safe we feel and by
their level of open or veiled dickishness.

But this is only ONE aspect of being a woman and we do not like to let
this aspect dominate how we live and behave within the tech
communities of our choice.

We feel the recent tendency of developing "codes of conducts" and
rules and regulations just for technology conferences and other
tech-related gatherings goes far beyond our reality we have
encountered so far.

We do not support the generalization of spreading guilt onto an entire
gender and we do not like to put each and every of our fellow
community attendees under general suspicion.

We also see a gathering of tech people as a professional event.
Therefore we expect all people to behave along the lines of what
Open Source communities regard as "professionalism". Recent events of
tasteless presentations for example created an level of outrage which
has been more than enough to make a point.

We also like to keep the vocabulary appropriate: An "assault" is an
act of violence, an agressive act to overpower a person. We do not
feel being hit on tastelessly being an assault. A blunt stare into
our cleavage is not an assault. Someone accidently touching us is not
an assault. The typical french pseudo-kiss-hug is a cultural thing
and not an assault. A hug might be a completely friendly act and not
an assault - even if it might not be welcome.

We also like to think logically and as women of tech, we might even
argue with statistics: Considering we're about 1% - 20% (which already
is a revolutionary high count of women) of any given community,
encountering 2 dicks at a 500 people conference are AMAZING odds -
nowhere else in our every day lives the odds are THAT good.

Let's also argue with legal issues: How is any code of conduct
actually help against assaults, rape or getting beaten up? All this is
illegal ANYWAYS in most places of the world. There already IS
a code of conduct in place - the law - as biased and weak it
sometimes might be.

And let's face it: No real dick will be put off by a code of conduct
helplessly condemning all kinds of unwelcome behavior - that's why
they're dicks - but a huge portion of men will keep to themselves
ridden by guilt because they're the ones actually thinking sensibly and
will ask themselves about their own dickishness.

We prefer taste, professionalism and behavior being created by living
a culture of taste, fun, substance and standards and not by writing a
long list of forbidden unpleasant things. We prefer to stand up
against dickish behavior when it happens.

But we also see Open Source gatherings as a social event and we're
going to actually say it in public: At a social event *gasp*
sexuality, friendship, teasing or flirting might happen. This is part
of humans living with each other. We consider the sexual liberation of
the 70ies as progress which gave us women new liberties to live as we
choose. We will not give up on that.

We see ourselves in the tradition of empowering feminism, of
emancipation by having learned to say No, by being able to defend
ourselves and we do not want to be indirectly victimized by
overarching acts of protection by condemning basically every social
behavior between men and women.

We are women of Perl and we're actually quite happy with our
community.

(You might be part of a completely different community and still agree
- let me know. :)

And so are others who shall remain unnamed.

Yours, truly - Su-Shee (Susanne Schmidt), castaway (Jess Robinson),
gshank (Gerda Shank), ether (Karen Etheridge), druthb (D Ruth
Bavousett), auggy (Augustina Ragwitz), Lady Aleena