Most conferences nowadays have a code of comment.
Osis organizers are very happy to respond, but we're also hoping that we never have to
use it.
But that's what we're going to talk about today, what happens if someone breaks the rules?
Exactly, because between the two of us we run plenty of events and we found that when
something actually happens, the document matters way less than whether or not the organizers
are prepared for what's next.
So who are we?
My name is Floor.
I'm a Principal Program Manager at EDB.
I'm a Postgres contributor through my work as a chair of the Postgres Community Code
of Comment Committee.
I'm on the Contributor Committee for Postgres.
I'm on the Postgres Europe Diversity Committee.
Lots of committees.
Also I organize PDDA Lowlands, which is an event in the Netherlands for Postgres, and I'm
a long-term DevOps-based organizer and core member as well.
And I'm yours.
I'm a tech lead for a Dutch company called Ogede, at our company where we think
called Safe Place, where we practice a lot of things we're going to talk about as well.
Besides my day job, I run DevOps-based Amsterdam, a Dutch cloud native day, I'm part
of DevOps-based core, and, like Floor mentioned, we've done, I think we've got 10 years
of experience between the two of us.
Not between the two of us.
Each, yeah, many, many years, and we've seen a lot, we want to give you some lessons
learned and talk about how we do things.
Exactly.
And just to level set, this is not an entry-level topic.
We're not going to talk about why you need a code of conduct, what is a code of conduct,
how you write one.
We assume that you have that knowledge already somewhat.
We're also not going to talk about what happens when someone breaks the law at your event,
which is something that, unfortunately, I have some experience with as well.
I hope that you never have to have that experience.
If someone breaks the law, you get the authorities involved.
All right, so you start to organize your conference, and there's a lot of stuff to do.
You have to get sponsors.
You have to set up a code for paper.
You have to refute 250 talks.
Now, it's listed that AI takes a lot of time.
And it needs to be catering, it needs to be conference-wide-wide.
Kind of common is there, but it's, for some organizers, a bit of an afterthought.
Because we have a good community, right?
We have a good community, no instance was reported in the last five years,
and if something happens, we'll know what to do.
Yeah, famous last words.
So, when something does happen, the hardest part is a defense itself.
It is the scrambling to respond, because who should respond, right?
Who is responsible for that?
How fast is fast enough?
Who should be involved in the decision?
Who should not be involved in the decision?
How is the communication with a person reporting an issue?
Like, how do we do with that?
What do we tell others?
And when the answers to these questions aren't clear beforehand,
organizers tend to freeze, because they don't want to get it wrong, right?
And so, you're just waiting, waiting to talk to someone else,
waiting to make that decision.
The decision often gets even harder when there's power
that makes involved, right?
Because what if the person offending is a speaker, a keynote speaker,
your platform's sponsor, or one of the organizers?
That's very difficult as well.
But waiting is not a neutral action.
It's sort of signals to the person who's reporting an issue
that you're not taking their experience seriously,
and that you're not a safe space for them.
So, we want to make sure to avoid any of that,
because even if you wait a long time,
and even if your decision is technically correct,
it doesn't feel right.
We've got a couple of scenarios for you.
These are things that happen.
We're not going in names, and we won't keep it blameless.
I think that's from DevOps, right?
Yes.
And then, let's say, we have a thing called open spaces.
It's very similar to the birds of a feather thing.
We have a false them.
It's an unconference type thing.
You suggest a topic.
We put it on the sticky.
We put the stick in a whiteboard.
We vote on the most interesting topics.
We get a room to discuss that topic.
No slides, no speaker.
There's a bunch of people talking.
At a 23 event, someone suggested the topic on women in tech,
and getting more women in tech.
The open space happened.
Someone talked about how women with headscarves
get preferential treatment over more competent and qualified men,
and we didn't have anyone in room.
We didn't have an organization in room or code of conduct,
team member.
After the open space, people came up to us talking about,
hey, that happened.
I was in room.
That's very uncomfortable.
No official report was made.
But we decided, hey, this goes against our code of conduct.
We're going to make a statement on stage,
add to closing notes, floor did, reiterating,
this type of behavior is not acceptable.
And if we were in the room, we would have,
it's very least, given that person warning or otherwise,
maybe we removed them from the conference.
Afterwards, multiple members of our community came up to both us,
telling how they appreciated our comments,
how they appreciated it, were very visible.
And that was basically our lessons learned.
Not only do you need to respond publicly
if something publicly happens to reassure your community
to show why your code of conduct is there.
But what we also learned is just having the code of conduct
in place is not enough.
We started out with just having the code of conduct.
We iterated with code of conduct training.
And now we do these scenarios, we run through a week,
two weeks before our conference.
Every organizer, every volunteer, goes through that training.
Yeah.
And oftentimes, your team is not big enough,
rights to have a person physically in every room.
So something we definitely learned is to anticipate
when a topic might be tricky to make sure
that those rooms are at least covered by us.
Yes, very much.
Yeah.
All right, for a different scenario,
different days, Amsterdam 2024, there were global events happening
or there are still global events happening
that got some strong reaction in our community.
One of our sponsors had their headquarters in Israel,
and at the same time, there were a lot of protests in Amsterdam
going on around the situation in Gaza.
So as part of our preparation for the event,
we decided to talk through a couple of what-if scenarios.
So for instance, we talked to the rest of the organizers,
what would happen if our sponsor, when they have their sponsor
page on stage, if someone would, in the audience would
send up and say something like free Palestine.
We made sure that the MC knew exactly what their line was
if something like that would happen.
And a code of conduct, a team member was present in the room
to make sure to talk to the person, shouting out,
says comments, after the session ended to talk to this member
to say, hey, interrupting someone, a community member,
like you and me, that is just doing their job,
goes against our code of conduct.
We don't want to see that behavior at our event.
This is not what we do.
The sponsor page happens, nobody got up,
nobody said anything, they went off without a hitch.
The sponsor was very appreciative because we reached out to them
before the event to tell them that we have
talks through a couple of what-if scenarios.
And so they were also aware what would happen
if a situation would occur.
Luckily, again, nothing happened, but they had some unpleasant
experiences at other events.
And so they were very happy that they were informed beforehand,
and I didn't need to worry about it at all.
Yeah, and that's the point to remember, the person there,
just doing their job as a sponsor, they're shooting their job.
That part of your community too, the code of conduct
applies to them as well.
Exactly.
So we also had a speaker from Israel
that we had reached out to beforehand as well.
That person was not able to join the events
because of travel restrictions, but similarly,
we just prepared with them beforehand.
And in 2025, we had two organizers join our team
that are originally from Israel.
And we just wanted to make sure to talk through them
about the values that we have as the DevOps Day's
Amsterdam organizing team, so that they would also know what
would happen in any type of situation.
So one of our speakers last year decided to wear a cafe.
And because we already talked to our organizers,
what would happen if someone wears a badge with, for instance, a flag,
or anything like that, or a t-shirt with some phrase on it,
they already knew how we would respond to it.
And because they knew, they weren't faced by the incident at all.
All right.
Not all DevOps Day's events are organized by the same team,
so some events may take a very different approach.
One event comes to mind that took place in a university.
Many student bodies are very active in protest.
I don't know if you came in through the back of the room
either, but there is something spray painted on one of the chairs.
Just sort of like proving my points.
And they felt like they didn't have enough manpower in the team.
They didn't have a budget for external security either.
And so just to make sure that everyone at the event felt safe,
they decided to not take sponsorship from companies that are in a country
that is currently in conflict.
That is their choice.
They wanted to make sure that they make a decision
that the whole team is confident in applying.
All right, so what do you actually need to prepare for?
Perfect, it's the enemy you've done.
You have to have a code of comment and it needs to cover,
we think, the basic things.
How can some more important issue?
Is that a code of comment phone?
Is that you find this person?
Is that an email?
That needs to be clear to the people wanting to report an issue.
But also, is it named?
It's the anonymous.
An anonymous reporting can be very safe,
but it's so hard to follow up on anonymous reports.
So for here community, you might reach different answered them.
We do for ours.
We want, we usually care about having people visible.
You can approach.
But that's for our specifically developed space.
What happens after a report is made?
But also what kind of actions do you take?
Can it be an apology?
Does it have to be public?
Is that private?
Do you bounce someone from the conference?
Do you refund that ticket if you do?
That's all stuff you can think about before and out.
And let's do these things come with trade-offs.
Also, your kind of comment doesn't need to be perfect.
Doesn't need to be technically correct.
Doesn't need to cover every edge case.
Because if you do, you run a risk of enforcing the code of comment
to the letter of the code of comment, the not spirit.
So someone might even abuse code of comment against another community member.
We've seen that happen.
Absolutely.
That doesn't mean, by the way, that you
do not need to invest any time in looking at your code of
conduct, I'm making sure that maybe it needs an additional little refresh.
So we had something a couple of years ago where people were ridiculed
for wearing face masks.
And we wanted to make sure that the code of conduct clearly states
that wearing a face mask is a personal choice,
and should not never be ridiculed.
Yes?
Yes, correct.
OK, thanks.
Thanks for confirming.
All right, so we're talking about decisions a lot.
One thing that is really important to decide up
beforehand is who is responsible for what?
So many conferences in our opening notes say,
like, if you have an issue with anything,
you go to the person wearing the orange shirt, or the green shirt,
or the staff shirt.
So that is something, sure.
But you might also need to be more clear on what kind of issue you can
bring to them, and what the action is that they will take after that.
Like, are they the person to actually leave your report with?
Or are they the person that will bring you to a person that is responsible
for the code of conduct?
So being a bit more clear about follow-up actions is very helpful.
Because sometimes when someone is upset and they approach you,
they might just want to, you know, vent to you,
and then be done with it.
So being clear, who can take what action is very helpful.
We actually advocate for any event to have a dedicated code of conduct
a response team that is their main or maybe their
only responsibility is with handling code of conduct reports.
Because organizers, you mentioned it beforehand,
they're busy with all of these other things, and it's very,
very stressful to get a code of conduct report on top of that.
And again, you don't want to make sure that these, you know,
a response to something like that is not delayed.
It's very stressful to do code of conducts duty.
It's not only a passive event, you're not just sort of like sitting there waiting
for something to happen and waiting for someone to bring a report to you.
You have to be vigilant during the entire event.
Maybe you need to check social media too to make sure that there's no harmful messaging
happening around your event on social media either.
So a couple of things to maybe help your code of conduct response team with that
is to create an on-call schedule for your team.
For the annual postgres, Europe conference, we had a code of conduct phone,
like you could have it, call an actual phone number,
and the four people that served on the code of conduct team
make sure to take turns taking this phone.
So it's not burdened the whole time because you cannot be on call
for four days in a row.
And when you're creating a code of conduct response team,
if you're convinced, then make sure that it's a diverse team in terms of gender as another,
in other ways, to employers, make sure that there's from different employers too,
and preferably have one person that is not an organizer.
The next external code of conduct team member,
because sometimes they're organized or as the offending party,
and it can be really daunting for someone to go to your code of conduct team,
to read out one of your peers, so that is definitely something
that we want, you know, suggest to do.
Yeah, we also very much advocate for practice.
Practice does make perfect, but it makes better.
And what I mean by that is you don't role play or anything,
and you write that scenarios, the like the ones we mentioned,
and they can just be a prompt.
Those could be things that you expect happening,
those could be things you talked about with other conferences in your area,
to happen there.
What if, or what comes in form of speaker?
What if, maybe you have a social event.
You serve all call, the sponsor misbehaves during that.
Do you allow them in the next day?
We've seen it happen at conferences.
I've had it happen myself, where at the speaker dinner,
speaking as over at a conference, we go back to hotel.
That part is technically not covered by the code of conduct,
but not organized or behaves very inappropriately.
What do you do? Is that technically part of the conference or not?
I ended up reporting it to the next day, and the person was no longer allowed to come in.
That's the kind of conversations you need to have,
and where the conversation turns uncomfortable, where you disagree,
that's the thing you're looking for, I think.
It's so much better to have this conversation two weeks, a week before the event,
instead of at 4 p.m. an hour before the closing notes,
and now you're in a discussion with five people.
Communicate, communicate, communicate, communicate is only for a reason,
but the last thing I want to mention on this slide is what's normal for me as a Dutch person,
which is transparent, maybe a little direct, is so much of the line for someone else.
Our Amsterdam team is 50% Dutch, but there's a lot of people who would have handled an incident differently than me.
What happens after the incidents you have decided on a course of action,
or you're deciding on a course of action, it can be extremely difficult.
If this is an offense that happened in a private situation, there were just two people involved,
then there is no need for a public apology, right?
If something happens on stage, it might need a public apology.
I think if this is the first time that a person does anything in your community,
they might be, you might be okay with just a warning.
If you know that this person is a repeat offender, you might want to tread differently.
I think what helps is thinking in proportion, two things to think about is what are the chances
of this happening again, and what can you do to make sure to avoid that, but also what helps to make
people feel safe in your community. As a little personal experience, a story, I attended a conference of
500 people. There was a question, how many people identified as a woman, five people raised their hands,
and later I, a sponsor made an uncomfortable comment towards me, and I walked up to one of the
organizers to tell them about it, and they were completely unequipped to do with my complaints.
They had no idea what to do, they said that they had never received a complaint before.
And I was like, here's only five women here, though. There's probably a reason for that,
and that's because we warn each other for this kind of events. If I'm at an event,
and I feel uncomfortable, I've been in an uncomfortable situation, I will tell my friends about this
to avoid this conference at all costs. Just because something isn't reported doesn't mean nothing
happened. So for us, for our team, what we find in Kerala be important to, as we're running out of time,
is to do a little review at the end of the conference, like a retrospective, if you will.
What, and well, where do you get stuck on making a decision, and this is how your code of conduct
becomes sort of more of a well-oiled process than just the document?
Yeah, and this is hard. We've done this for 10 years, and every time new stuff comes up.
We're running almost out of time, so we want to give you a couple of last things to think about.
Yeah, to discuss in the hallway, if you will, because 20 minutes again is not enough to talk about this.
So one thing that's top of mind for DevOps-based organizers right now is what do you do if you
hear from other event organizers or attendees that someone has broken the code of conduct at
another event, or this person is maybe even a repeal fender, and now there is speaker at your event,
where it's indeed at your event. Do you ban this person? Do you talk to your fellow
organizers to make sure that you're more vigilant in checking out that this person is behaving?
And what factors into your decision to maybe ban someone from your event at all? Do you
ask for their side of the story? Yeah, and if you do an event, and you serve alcohol,
that should go out of conduct and needs to stay sober, that's maybe a different answer for each
community, as well. Yeah, for DevOps-based, I'm sure that we decided that yes, but it's maybe an
unpopular opinion. And I think also for this, so for so many things in software and in life,
your answer might be a depends, and we're curious what it depends on, so please talk to us.
Thank you.