draft - Music Hack Day Code of Conduct

conduct.md

** Note: This now lives at https://github.com/musichackday/MHD-Conduct. Please post new comments / submit pull requests there instead of here **

Music Hack Day Code of Conduct

This is a first draft of a Code of Conduct for Music Hack Day events, based on similar codes of conduct, such as the PyCon Code of Conduct and its upstream template from the Geek Feminism wiki and the Ada Initiative.

Because this is a draft, your comments, criticisms, and feedback are appreciated. We would like Music Hack Day to be deliberately and specifically open and welcoming to everyone, and navigating the tech-meets-pop-culture in both an inclusive and an artistically-friendly way is challenging.

As this is, in its first draft, I am having a particularly hard time figuring out how to write the last paragraph of the "in depth" section in a way that both curbs potential harrassment, and also does not prevent someone from building something like an automatic-playlist-generator based on user input. Feedback on that paragraph in particular would be greatly appreciated.

The one-liner

Music Hack Day is dedicated to a harassment-free hackathon experience for everyone. Our anti-harassment policy can be found at: http://conduct.musichackday.org/

Medium Version

Music Hack Day organizers are dedicated to providing a harassment-free hackathon experience for everyone, regardless of gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, or religion. We do not tolerate harassment of hackathon attendees in any form.

Music Hack Day is an event about having fun, building cool stuff, and meeting new people. Though it is more informal than a professional environment, attendees are expected to behave responsibly and courteously. Be kind to one another.

Hackathon attendees violating these rules may be sanctioned or expelled from the hackathon at the discretion of the conference organizers.

In more depth

Harrassment includes offensive verbal comments, sexual images in public spaces, deliberate intimidation, stalking, following, harrasing photography or recording, sustained disruption of talks or presentations, inappropriate physical contact, and unwelcome sexual attention.

In the context of this document, an attendee is anyone present at the event. This includes sponsors, technology presenters, hackers, and the audience for the hack demoes at the end of the weekend.

All attendees are subject to the anti-harrassment policy. In particular, sponsors and presenters should not use sexualized images, activities, or other material. If booths and booth staff are present, booth staff (including volunteers) should not use sexualized clothing, uniforms, or costumes, or otherwise create a sexualized environment.

Attendees asked to stop any harrassing behavior are expected to comply immediately.

Attendees violating these rules may be sanctioned or expelled from the hackathon at the discretion of the event's organizers.

As a music tech event and a hackathon, we recognize that our circumstances are slightly different than the average tech conference for which the original code of conduct was designed. Music and related aspects of pop culture are often highly sexualized, both lyrically and aesthetically. As such, it is possible that an otherwise inoffensive hack may become offensive by selecting or involving explicit or offensive music, lyrical content, or album covers. Hacks of this type should be identified as such at the beginning of their demo, and presenters should provide people in the audience an opportunity to step out if they feel like they might be offended by the hack. Presenters should also make an effort to ensure that the content used in their demo is not offensive.

This is a nice initiative, but if I may make a few initial remarks:

• It is my opinion that everyone can clothe themselves the way they want. It is not up to the victim of harassment to stop wearing "sexualized clothing", but it is up to the assaulter to stop harassing. In making a text like this, we need to be very careful in phrasing correctly what we want to attain. Prohibiting some forms of personal expression (like putting limits on what one can wear), because they might lead to becoming the victim of harassment, can be viewed as "victim blaming". Right now, the phrase should not use sexualized clothing sounds like "if you don't want to be harassed, dress like a nun". That's the wrong message to send.

• Read any lyrics to popular songs: most of them aren't really catholic. In music, references to sex and crime cannot be avoided. We need to deal with that as adults in a mature way. Prohibiting any display or reference to sexuality is exactly not that. It needs to be debatable as something that is part of our society, and not locked away behind a wall of shaming and censorship. Instead of barring any "sexualized content", I'd rather add the following:

  Musichackday has a global audience of all ages, including young children. Presenters are expected to respect this audience: any presentation of something that might be deemed unappropriate for part of the audience should come with a timely warning. Participants are expected to behave exemplary with the utmost diligence and respect, throughout the hackday, the presentations, and the satellite events.

Wrapping up: we need to target the harassers, while being careful in putting expressive restrictions in place.

Thanks much for the comments. I've attempted to round up some non-white-male opinions on Twitter, and here at Rdio, and have already gotten some private feedback that I'll be incorporating soon.

@freenerd, does it make sense to put this into the manifesto? i'm inclined to think keeping it as its own document makes more sense, but adding a link to it from the manifesto.

@plamere, thanks for that link. I was previously unaware of that situation. The point about a warning before every hack seems valid, as if it happens before every presentation, it will certainly become noise.

Focusing on inclusivity and on positive "do this" directives rather than "don't do this" directives makes sense to me. When I was involved in meetings at CrashSpace in its early days, we thought about making the first rule of the space "Don't be a dick". Instead, we chose a non-gendered and positive spin, "Be Awesome", which has been effective (afaik), but is also a bit more vague. "Don't be an asshole" is a reasonable step away from gendered language, but is still a negative rule, rather than a positive one.

@jganseman, I think we have differing opinions on why the sexualized clothing clause is in the original template. My understanding of the motivation behind that clause is to tell companies that booth babe marketing is not an acceptable practice.

I do see how you reached the conclusion you did, though, so the language in that clause could probably be better. The bulk of that clause came from the original template, so if we come up with something that avoids implying victim blaming while maintaining the stance on sexualized marketing, we should probably consider pushing those changes upstream as well.

Aaah, that makes sense of course - I was totally unaware booth babe marketing was targeted, hence my previous comments. Yes, I agree we should take a stance against such marketing tactics. The least we can expect from participating companies is that they show themselves professional and treat their staff respectfully. At the very least nobody should be forced to wear anything in which they feel uncomfortable.

In making my previous comments I was actually thinking of a hack I remember from MHD (Barbican, I believe), where someone caught quite a bit of attention by sewing touch sensors into a T-shirt on the chest, linked to a synth. Basically, the idea was to touch her in that rather private area to produce music, and everyone present was warmly invited to try it out. This raised many eyebrows, and clearly carried a sexual undertone, but it was pretty harmless and rather funny. In this particular case "body-positivity" was probably the right keyword, however, many people (including me) needed some time getting used to the idea and red cheeks were never far away.

In the end I think it was a neat hack and should be allowed. The term "sexualized clothing" in the code of conduct proposal is a bit confusing to me in that respect. Maybe we should steer the phrasing more in the direction of promoting a "consent culture"? Or as a general guideline:

If you wouldn't say/show it to your grandparents at the christmas dinner, then don't say/show it to your fellow hackers at the hackday.

If we ever have booths at a Music Hack Day, something has gone terribly wrong.

Here are some of the situations that we've seen recently at Music Hack Days:

• During one of the API demos, folks are invited to text a message to a phone number and the messages are shown on the screen. In certain venues (especially hackathons at universities), there seems to be a contest to put the rudest message on the screen. The result is a screen full of offensive messages.
• During the Boston MHD, this demo was on the list - https://www.hackerleague.org/hackathons/music-hack-day-boston-2013/hacks/hot-bitch - but the demo was never shown
• Sometimes there are younger kids in the audience. At the London MHD last week, there were grade school kids in the audience during the API presentations (they were the kids of the venue owner). A couple of API presenters couldn't help themselves from swearing (but apologized for it).

To layer on to @plamere's comments - the way that the producer of the 48 Hour Film project in Boston handled this was to segment out 'PG' screening groups where there was an expectation of 'appropriate' (in quotes because this is always hard to define) content.

I can imagine a few questions that might help:

• Does your hack include explicit or potentially offensive material, or does it deal with a subject that that would not be appropriate for an audience that included grade school children?
• Does your hack directly reference or is it likely to include music with explicit lyrics or [explicit/suggestive] cover art / animated gifs (seems to be a popular hack theme these days)?
• Does your hack invite free-form feedback or music suggestions from the audience that will be shown on screen?

I am curious what the impact would be if the organizers arranged the presentations so that global announcements could be made - "ok, we're going to move onto hacks that may include references to explicit music/art", and then "some of the hacks in this next group may include topics or themes..."

By putting hacks that are vouched for as appropriate at the beginning of the demos, we might be able to avoid a situation where many were compelled to call out a disclaimer before their presentation.

If you will include a list of what not to discriminate on the basis of, consider adding "age," "ethnicity" (separate from race), "place of origin."

I'd also like to see more language about inclusivity. Two thoughts:
1 - Does Music Hack Day uphold Radical Inclusion, Communal Effort, and Civic Responsiblity principles of Burning Man? If so, maybe you should lead with something to this effect:

"Anyone may be a part of Music Hack Day, which values collaboration and creativity. Participants are responsible for treating others inclusively and with respect and to speak up if others are not doing the same. If you witness or experience behavior that is excluding, harassing, or may otherwise inhibit someone from full and unbridled participation in this hackathon, please notify event organizers immediately and discretely."

2 - This would also benefit from language about being conscious of different communication styles and providing space for everyone to speak. Male voices tend to dominate conversations in the tech world. Not just because there are more of them, but because they tend to make less space for female voices in the forms of fielding input from less, asking fewer questions to, speaking over, and not creating space to hear from people who are not so quick to speak. I don't have sample language of this type to draw from, but conduct that creates space for all communication styles is essential for an inclusive hackathon.

One more thought is that as Code of Conduct this one is very heavy on the harassment language, making it read more like an anti-harassment policy than a Code of Conduct. You noted that you wanted more language in here that takes a positive approach, which I think will really help create a COC.

There is a lot of good stuff in here about harassment and hostile public spaces. Depending on what you are going for, it may either belong in a section about harassment or would benefit from refinement by word choice. Harassment is targeted at individuals, unwanted, and repetitive, and in my experience unusual bad behavior at a hackathon. Instead, behavior and environmental characteristics that make people uncomfortable and prohibited from being their best is more common and more subtle. You might be able to replace some of the language about "harassment" with language about "discrimination" and calling out "sexualized content and environments" directly as inappropriate (since they aren't really harassment).