The people removed from the conference have a history of disruption and harassment in the community. They were removed because of previous behavior that the organizer was not aware beforehand. He relied on the testimony of people he trust.

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> Being able to deal with people that make you very uncomfortable without creating a fuss is a fundamental requirement of adulthood

The only people who engaged in "creating a fuss" were the speaker and a third-party related to her. They decided to come forward and "out" themselves. Up to that point, everything had been handled in private. There was no need to involve other people such as the organizer's girlfriend or other speakers.

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> It is exactly the same behavior.

The organizer denied a speaking position and did so in private, without incurring any shame or denying participation in general.

The speaker and a third party started a campaign of doxxing, harassment and, as other commented put it: "public shaming using false allegations of stalking and harassment".

There's a world of difference between those two behaviors.

> Generally, the best scenario is to talk with the involved parties, to cooperate and to seek a solution that doesn’t make the problem bigger. This isn’t always possible. In this case they went public and accused me and I had to explain what happened.

One of the parties involved wasn't interested in civilized collaboration, but making false accusations instead.

There wouldn't be much of a collaboration if people bail or a bad incident happens at the conference.

The fact that multiple people went out of their way to warn the conference organisers suggests this goes well beyond a normal difference of opinion.

In that context it was a difficult but correct call in my opinion.

Plus frankly if staying away from such people is uncivilized, then I'm ok with being uncivilized.

What she accused him of doing was entirely false while uninviting her was based on something entirely true. You are comparing harm caused by false accusation to one caused by actual grievance.

The reason I think specifying people by name would have been OK is that 1 - they were presumably an issue for a number of attendees due to (prior) publicly stated positions and 2 - they apparently made subsequent statements via "broadcast" media such as Twitter, for anyone to peruse. This would be quite different if the people were more private, and if all discussions had been private and/or via non-broadcast tools like SMS or WhatsApp. Plus naming names could cause me to read what they had said and even disagree with the OP, at least on the baseline of non-inviting them. However the anonymity made the post much more interesting.

The conferences were small (<200 people) but I don't remember the organization being as stressful as the article describes.

For me, the key sources of stress were:

1. hoping that tickets and sponsorship would cover our costs (at some point you have to pay for your venue, flights for your keynotes, etc. and this happens before ticket sales open). I think that we lost a few hundred dollars on the first conference and donated a few hundred dollars to the Python Software Foundation on the second one.

2. the BBQ. For both years, I arranged a beach BBQ but didn't have enough budget to deal with contingencies in the event of rain (remember this is Vancouver so the chance definitely exists). My plan was to refund attendees if we canceled the BBQ but that would have been thousands of dollars out of my pocket and lots of disappointed people. Fortunately, it didn't rain in either years.

I would say that convening a conference in a city where you have lots of connections really helps. For example, I was able to buy salmon direct from the docks for the BBQ because I knew someone who was willing to help me. I also used my family as the chefs (https://photos.app.goo.gl/C6yNzqMnBG98GxE36).

What I do remember being hard was not the planning but going without sleep during the conference itself. As a convener, I had to be at the venue before any attendees arrived, had to leave after the last attendee left and then still had to deal with issues, etc. for the next day.

Still it was tonnes of fun!

At that point you know you made the right choice... the rest is mind boggling.

Either way, this is an excellent example of why the Twitter Justice System is a bad idea.

> conferences tend to net to a loss.

If you put out a lot of energy, for "free", then you often get shit in return. If you don't take responsibility for what you are getting back for all your hard effort, things can easily go pear-shaped. This seems to be one of those mystical laws of the universe. I'm not saying you should be selfish, or charge big bucks for your time. There are plenty of ways for people to give something back, and you need to make sure that is happening too.

I think the Industry has invited this sort of bad behavior by rewarding Cry Bullies at conferences. People act enititled and they're not willing to put up with speakers who they may have political or philosophical problems with. Similarly, speakers are expecting privileged treatment too, like the spurned speaker in this blog posting.

When there is a real problem, we're unsure who or what to believe. People will complain with the same force whether the problem is big or small. And everyone tries for a "gotcha" and then to have a Trial by Twitter.

As a conference organiser, handling social media fires is especially hard, because you're at peak load already. You're organising a conference!

I'm surprised to hear a conference organizer say this, because I think it's an unrealistic goal.

There's a difference between people feeling as if their safety is being directly threatened by someone at a conference and someone feeling uncomfortable with a speaker because of, for instance, some of their personal views that they strongly disagree with.

(Edit: In the original version of OP's blog post, it did not say why people were uncomfortable with the speaker. It said, "My team and I were contacted by different people to warn us that they were uncomfortable with the participation of a speaker and her partner in our conference. They told the organization of the conference that we would have problems with the speaker and his partner. his communication took us by surprise since we had performed a basic background check on the chosen speakers to avoid these kinds of issues." The blog post was later updated to clarify, "They told the organization of the conference that this couple had caused problems to women in the community," which is still pretty vague.)

Obviously, conference organizers should be taking attendees' safety seriously and making sure they're not being subjected to harassment or unjust discrimination.

But if you take a "comfort is priority #1" mindset, it gives a lot of ammunition to people who dislike a speaker's political views or choices they might make in their personal life.

HN has had a bunch of previous threads about how welcoming conferences should be to speakers who hold unorthodox or unpopular opinions -- stuff that potential attendees might object to.

I think the general consensus has been:

If there is real evidence (e.g. past conduct at similar events) that they are likely to engage in conduct that directly threatens the safety of other attendees or otherwise violate the conference's code of conduct, it's a no-brainer. Disinvite.

If they hold unorthodox, potentially objectionable opinions, but there's no evidence that they're going to violate the code of conduct, and the issue is that people merely feel uncomfortable being around someone who holds such views (or they feel as if the conference is implicitly endorsing such views by having the person as a speaker) then you take one of several paths:

If the opinion is unquestionably beyond the pale, like something that 9 out of 10 attendees would say, "Yeah, that's truly awful," then it's a pretty easy decision. Disinvite.

If the opinion is about an issue that is merely controversial -- meaning that in mainstream society, there is a wide range of opinions (e.g. any strong opinion about abortion or guns) -- then you have to do some weighing of principles vs. practical considerations. If maintaining the person as a speaker is going to tank your conference, then even if you don't support disinviting them as a matter of principle, you might decide it's necessary on a practical level. But if it's not going to tank your conference, then you might be able to lean more heavily on principles.

My sympathies go out to him, and I hope he get support in this, and it doesn't suck up their will to do good things for the community like organise conferences.

There is a conference I've gone to twice now and really enjoyed, so I'm going again this year. But I expect as this conference grows, eventually this stuff will come along with it and I'll stop attending.

It's a shame, but I don't really pin this hostility on any particular group (ie, I'm not mad about "SJWs" or whatever). A lot of people acted in bad faith for a lot of years for us to reach this point. There is another poster in this thread talking about how "cry bullies" caused the problem. That kind of shit is not helping.

Edit: I already regret making this post.

I had a similar experience in a class recently. I couldn't help but keep thinking "my 9 year old knows better than to behave like this" (and my 9 year old has his own developmental challenges). The behavior was really shocking considering everyone in the room was an adult.

Unfortunately there wasn't much I felt I could do. It was a short class, and I had the impression that this person was well versed in pulling the appropriate levers to protect themselves from any negative reaction to their behavior whatever they didn't like by claiming privilege, race, sex etc whenever possible (this person made lots of conspicuous references the very first day and the second .. .and so on before trouble started). They were also always just some terrible victim of something or other ... but as time went on it was pretty clear that it was all just a system that allowed them to behave poorly, make outbursts and bully others.

I specifically asked not to be in any groups with this person and my request was honored thankfully.

To be clear I mentioned privilege, race, and sex, any consideration of those things was NOT the source of the problem, had there been none of that I'm certain that the person in question would have found other ways to manipulate the situation, their behavior was the real issue.

It sounds like the proper response to this is to tell the individual to "fuck off and never come back", but looks like popularity mattered too much to the Derbycon organizers:

> Admittedly, we had no idea how to handle this person, and in fear of repercussion of removing this person, allowed them to stay at the conference in order to “not upset the masses”.

Guys, the response to adults acting like children is to completely ignore them and kick them out of your discussions. They do not deserve to be a part of your forum. Perhaps tell them why you're doing so, so they can improve themselves, but there is no need to deal with their shit.

Telling this story this way isn't likely to be seen as attacking someone else / not a huge benefit to them / perhaps LESS of an incentive to lie..

Believe the author or not, but there are some fucking Looney Tunes folks out there. If you go gathering a crowd of people above a critical mass, you're going to have to deal with a few of them at some point. That should be your take-away.

Personally I know of someones who behaved a bit like was described in the article. I would not be comfortable being around them either, even though I was never a target of their wrath.*

*For the record I've no idea who the people in the article are and I'm 100% sure the people I'm thinking of are not them.

But the orthodoxy is generally sincere in wanting to promote their preferred behavior, e.g. diversity or inclusivity, so they tend to write it into the code of conduct.

My point is: on the one hand, if you disagree with the ideology, then... that's just that. You disagree about what is most decent to do. But I don't believe that you are confused about what other people's ideologies are -- you know perfectly well why they are doing the things they do, what value system informs their actions. So what's the point of protesting it here like you're bewildered about it? The only result is people shouting their stances at each other -- not a debate, or even an argument, at all.

I mention this, and risk making things worse, because I think it is important to recognize this thread as one of those pointlessly destructive ones, which changes nothing except to make people more annoyed at each other. It just amounts to people saying what they think and trying to make it sound abundantly reasonable so the other side sounds wrong. It's a fake argument; what's the point of starting it?

I understand that perhaps to some people this may sound like a statement made in an effort to counteract identity politics, but isn't it really its own brand of identity politics?

You're calling on the OP to ignore a thing, while you cannot ignore this other thing. It's weird.

I was with the author until the UX part. Why does everything have to boil down to color themes and padding? I don't see why you need to focus on this for a software program. It should be about correctness and performance.