PyCon conference.
Sendgrid’s developer evangelist, Adria Richards… present.
Two more geeks behind her.
They allegedly make jokes around ‘big’ dongles and ‘forking’.
Adria tweet-pics them to her 9,000+ followers and things go berserk!
Not cool.Jokes about forking repo’s in a sexual way and “big” dongles.Right behind me #pycon twitter.com/adriarichards/?
? Adria Richards (@adriarichards) March 17, 2013
One, of the two geeks who made the so-called joke, one of them gets fired by his employer – Playhaven.
Two, Sendgrid comes under a DDOS attack after the news goes viral everywhere. They had to post her firing on their Facebook page since their website was down at that time! After the announcement, the website goes up again!
You just have to see the comments in,
a. Adria’s blog post explaining her stand
b. Venturebeat’s coverage of Playhaven firing one of their employees
c. Venturebeat’s coverage of Sendgrid firing Adria
It’s one big, bad, racial, abusive mess. They are cleaning up comments constantly, though.
From my perspective, Adria had 3 options, when confronted with allegedly sexual remarks by two men behind her (note – these comments were not about her in specific).
1. Turn around and ask them to shut up. This is easier said than done – the gender issue would flare up and I’m sure they may start making more jokes if they are in an adventurous mood.
2. Her company, Sendgrid, is a Gold sponsor for the event. She is Sendgrid’s developer evangelist. She would have known at least a few organizers. Ping them (text, direct message on Twitter etc. – there are tons of private messaging options) and inform them about what is happening behind her. Let them deal with the situation.
3. Take things into her hand and tweet-pic them. And then follow it up with a lengthy blog post (that, to be honest, seems too long and unnecessarily grand)
She opted for the third.
Much like what Delhi Police or Janagraha’s I Paid A Bribe exhort you to do online, one Facebook/websites!
The point is, this is still mob justice. When Delhi Police asks citizens to report crimes/violations, they are assuming that citizens can differentiate between what is right and what is wrong. In most cases, that may be true, but there is a case for bias and misuse. And the ensuing public naming and shaming of someone who could be wrongly accused for assorted reasons.
In Adria’s case, while many commenters and the 2 geeks in question have alleged that they were not making sexual jokes, and that it was entirely Adria’s imagination, she perhaps never thought it appropriate to let anyone get their side of the story *before* she could publicly shame them.
That could have been achieved by sending a private message to the organizers, who were prmopt enough to appear in the scene for her public tweet.
There are multiple implications here. One of the comments in Adria’s blog post equated this with a restaurant scenario – what if you find a waiter picking his nose at a restaurant?
You could,
1. Tell him to stop picking his nose, directly. He could comply or could go to another room and continue to do it. He could also ‘do something’ to your food for telling him off.
2. Tell the hotel authorities about it – let them handle it since they are his employers.
3. Tell the whole world about it by taking a pic of him in your smartphone’s 13 megapixel camera (better low-light performance?) and then let everyone involved – the waiter, the hotel authorities and the world – do what they should/could do, to salvage the situation.
Personally, I’d go with option 2. That seems like the most sane and logical option to me, but I understand why someone would opt for 1 or 3. Option 1 is perhaps my 2nd best way out, but definitely not option 3. Why? Because, there is a 0.5% chance for this.
Jokes apart, this is a massive mess of an issue now. It has got everything involved – Adria’s African-American race, explosion of gender divide debate, geeks throwing her death/rape threats, 2 people without a job (one of them with 3 kids), DDOS attacks and a lot of anger all around.
One thing that is spoken about relatively less is that of people with supposed influence online using their clout out of turn. As Spiderman has given us that now-cliched phrase, ‘With great power comes great responsibility’, let me rephrase it for these Twitter times – Think Twice Before Every Tweet.