[sudo-discuss] Fwd: Re: Fwd: [Noisebridge-discuss] Consensus on Barring Shawn Landden from the Noisebridge space and community (Was Re: On Asking People To Leave (Was Re: Shawn L. ))

Yeah... I'm going to chime in here to perhaps add some perspective as to why it did take so long. Shawn seemed like a pretty decent guy. I thought he was a little skeezy (he was always heaping more attention on the ladies at Noisebridge than was warranted by normal dictates of conversation / situation) ... ...but I just figured "slut", not multiple-misdemeanors-warrant-for-his-arrest-etc. And I'm (probably) a lot more socially aware than most hackers. I'm also pretty fearless for someone of my gender. What that means is that someone like Shawn instinctively goes after women full of fear and self-doubt, who don't see his manipulation coming. So while people like me, who interacted with Shawn on a very regular basis (he was there almost every afternoon I happened to be there), figured, "hm okay, nice enough guy, here a lot, whatever..." he was able to throw down some major bullshit in other social territories. When you've got victims being fearful and unconfident people in the first place, it's extremely unlikely they will come forward about whatever happened to them. And in this case, the victims all (reportedly) said, when they were approached about his actions, "I thought I was the only one!" The subtext of a declaration like that is, "I thought there was something wrong with me, so I didn't want to tell anyone." ... I hope that helps. The huge question Noisebridge is presently dancing around right now is, how many of our current cultural disturbances are based on Noisebridge being broken, and how many are basically inevitable outgrowths of NB having grown to 10 x Dunbar's Number in community size? My money's on situations like Shawn L. coming up again, and not because NB is broken, but because these are the problems of our time. The positive side of that is, maybe, despite these being hard problems that nobody has yet been able to solve, hackerspaces can figure this out. And then we'd win Civilization! --Naomi On Sat, Mar 23, 2013 at 7:18 PM, rachel lyra hospodar <rachelyra(a)gmail.com> wrote: > Feel free to follow through on the ideas you have posted here and report > back to the group. > > If you believe that people acting on their own agency haven't gone far > enough it would be more productive (and considerate of mitigating factors, > such as the social shitstorms heaped on women who pursue harassment > remediation within the tech community) to go for what you see as the next > step, rather than criticizing the tactics chosen. > > I disagree with some of what you have stated (re permanent demonization of > bad actors) but you are welcome to that opinion. > > R.