Safe Conferences Are Deliberately Designed

Creating safety is not the same as creating a feeling of safety.

TL;DR Summary

In writing this, I ended up with more than 6,000 words to express my thoughts. For those who want to get the essence without plowing through all that, here are the quick points:

• Safety is the primary job of anyone who produces events.
• Attendee harassment is a safety issue.
• Bad behavior isn’t just the responsibility of an errant attendee. Event producers own some of it too.
• Event producers make design choices that change attendee behaviors, either to be more professional or less professional.
• While “Jerks will be jerks” and we can’t eliminate all instances of harassment, we can design our events to minimize them.
• A strong Code of Conduct promises remedies that are likely to be costly and constraining to event producers.
• Many Code of Conduct documents are weak in their remedies, to avoid delivering any actual promises, because it makes the events cheaper and easier to produce and removes risk and liability from the event producers.
• A weak Code of Conduct is a placebo label saying a conference is safe, without actually ensuring it’s safe.
• Absence of a Code of Conduct does not mean that the organizers will provide an unsafe conference.