If you are being made to feel unsafe, uncomfortable, you feel the code of conduct has been violated, or you notice this happening to someone else, please contact an organizer directly, email [email protected], or if you would like to voice your concerns anonymously, you can use our Suggestion Ox Mailbox.
PyLadies Vancouver is dedicated to providing a safe, respectful, harassment-free community for everyone.
- Be friendly and patient
- Be welcoming
- Be considerate and respectful
- Be careful in the words that you use
- Respect that PyLadies Vancouver must be a place where women's voices are heard centred
Harassment and exclusionary behaviour is not acceptable. This includes, but is not limited to:
- Offensive comments related to gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, mental illness, physical appearance, body size, race, or religion
- Unwelcome comments regarding a person’s lifestyle choices and practices, including those related to food, health, parenting, drugs, and employment.
- Gratuitous or off-topic sexual images or behaviour
- Physical contact and simulated physical contact (eg, textual descriptions like “hug” or “backrub”) without consent or after a request to stop.
- Stalking or following
- Harassing photography or recording
- Violent threats or language
If a participant engages in harassing behaviour, representatives of the community may take reasonable action they deem appropriate, including warning the offender, expulsion from any PyLadies Vancouver event, or expulsion from mailing lists, IRC chats, discussion boards and other electronic communications channels to resolve the issue. This may include expulsion from PyLadies Meetup group membership.
This Code of Conduct has been adapted from the Geek Feminism Wiki code of conduct, the Django code of conduct and is licensed under CC-BY-SA.
From the Recurse Center Manual
The first rule means you shouldn't act surprised when people say they don't know something. This applies to both technical things ("What?! I can't believe you don't know what the stack is!") and non-technical things ("You don't know who RMS is?!"). Feigning surprise has absolutely no social or educational benefit: When people feign surprise, it's usually to make them feel better about themselves and others feel worse. And even when that's not the intention, it's almost always the effect. As you've probably already guessed, this rule is tightly coupled to our belief in the importance of people feeling comfortable saying "I don't know" and "I don't understand." No well-actually's
A well-actually happens when someone says something that's almost - but not entirely - correct, and you say, "well, actually…" and then give a minor correction. This is especially annoying when the correction has no bearing on the actual conversation. This doesn't mean the Recurse Center isn't about truth-seeking or that we don't care about being precise. Almost all well-actually's in our experience are about grandstanding, not truth-seeking. (Thanks to Miguel de Icaza for originally coining the term "well-actually.") No back-seat driving
Our last social rule bans subtle racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and other kinds of bias. This one is different from the rest, because it covers a class of behaviors instead of one very specific pattern.
Subtle -isms are small things that make others feel unwelcome, things that we all sometimes do by mistake. For example, saying "It's so easy my grandmother could do it" is a subtle -ism. Like the other three social rules, this one is often accidentally broken. Like the other three, it's not a big deal to mess up – you just apologize and move on.