Code of conduct
!!Con West’s Code of Conduct committee has compiled a transparency report for reported incidents in 2019.
Our goal with !!Con West is to bring the US west coast computing community together for a conference about the excitement, joy, and surprise of computing.
We value the participation of each member of the community and want all attendees to have an enjoyable and fulfilling experience. Accordingly, all attendees are expected to show respect and courtesy to other attendees throughout the conference and at all conference events, whether officially sponsored by !!Con West or not.
All attendees, speakers, exhibitors, organizers and volunteers at any !!Con West event are required to observe the following Code of Conduct. Organizers will enforce this code throughout the event.
Why have a code of conduct? Not because we feel like we’re expected to have one; not because someone told us to; not because we heard somewhere that it was important for some reason – but as part of an intentional effort to define the culture of !!Con West.
The short version
!!Con West is dedicated to providing a harassment-free conference experience for everyone, regardless of gender, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, religion, or anything else. We do not tolerate harassment of conference participants in any form.
All communication should be appropriate for a professional audience including people of many different backgrounds. Sexual language and imagery is not appropriate for any conference venue, including talks.
Be kind to others. Do not insult or put down other attendees. Behave professionally. Remember that harassment and sexist, racist, or exclusionary jokes are not appropriate for !!Con West.
Attendees violating these rules may be asked to leave the conference at the sole discretion of the conference organizers.
Thank you for helping make this a welcoming, friendly event for all.
The longer version
Harassment includes offensive verbal comments related to gender, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, religion, sexual images in public spaces, deliberate intimidation, stalking, following, harassing photography or recording, sustained disruption of talks or other events, inappropriate physical contact, derisive comments regarding technical background, and unwelcome sexual attention.
Participants asked to stop any harassing behavior are expected to comply immediately.
Be careful in the words that you choose. Remember that sexist, racist, and other exclusionary jokes can be offensive to those around you. Excessive swearing and offensive jokes are not appropriate for !!Con West.
If a participant engages in behavior that violates the anti-harassment policy, the conference organizers may take any action they deem appropriate, including warning the offender or expulsion from the conference.
Social rules
In addition to having a code of conduct as an anti-harassment policy, we have a small set of social rules we follow. We (the organizers) learned and lifted these rules from the Recurse Center in New York, where we felt that they contributed enormously to a supportive, productive, and fun learning environment. We’d like !!Con West to share that environment. These rules are intended to be lightweight, and to make more explicit certain social norms that are normally implicit. Most of our social rules really boil down to “don’t be a jerk” or “don’t be annoying.” Of course, almost nobody sets out to be a jerk or annoying, so telling people not to be jerks isn’t a very productive strategy.
Unlike the anti-harassment policy, violation of the social rules will not result in expulsion from the conference or a strong warning from conference organizers. Rather, they are designed to provide some lightweight social structure for conference attendees to use when interacting with each other.
If you have any questions about any part of the code of conduct or social rules, please feel free to reach out to any of the conference organizers.
Contact information
If you are being harassed, notice that someone else is being harassed, or have any other concerns, please contact a member of conference staff. You can use the below form to contact us, with or without your name.
Conference staff will be happy to do whatever we can to help those experiencing harassment to feel safe for the duration of the conference. We value your attendance.
Report a violation (with or without your name)
License
The !!Con West Code of Conduct is under a Creative Commons Zero license. It was lightly modified from the !!Con 2018 Code of Conduct, itself a fork of the PyCon 2013 Code of Conduct, which is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.