Hacker News Reader

Comment by petercooper | Hacker News Reader

From said code of conduct: "If what you’re doing is making someone feel uncomfortable, that counts as harassment and is enough reason to stop doing it."

This is a mechanism by which anyone could be expelled for saying anything someone else doesn't like. It's a clear policy, which either you support (by attending their events and avoiding saying anything anyone else might find offensive) or not (by staying home and doing what you like).

(I must disclose I have a juvenile and often offensive sense of humor. At events with codes of conduct - and MLH's is based upon a popular one, O'Reilly's contains similar language - I only act myself with people I know who are comfortable with it, and play my filtered persona otherwise. Putting stuff on an event's Facebook group is like being on stage, you gotta be careful of being yourself - keep jokes to people you know.)

View on HN

MLH had no authority to kick out the students. The hackathon is run by a separate group of Waterloo students, whereas MLH is a for-profit hackathon organization that just helps colleges with sponsorships.

Unfortunately they did. It's buried in the Sanctioning Agreement, but by accepting MLH sanctioning (which is done via a legally binding contract) you allow MLH authority over who attends the event. They don't advertise this fact very much.

You've written this a few times, but there's no proof that that is the case.

MLH obviously had a commercial relationship with the University and that would likely entitle them to certain authorities. Unless your privy to the contract, or the University has officially stated otherwise, what source are you using to back this up?

My other sources have to remain private unfortunately. (official responses haven't been crafted yet)

But I can say that even if it ends up that they technically had the authority to do this, then us Hack the North organizers were mislead to an extraordinarily large degree about the nature of the relationship between MLH and Hack the North.

Hack The North's official statement supports the cations taken by MLH. http://hackthenorth.com/hackthenorth-response.pdf

OK. The story doesn't make the relationship clear. It reads as if MLH was the organization running/policing the event.

On the other hand, you want to be able to throw out people who are a nuisance and it is quite difficult to codify what that constitutes.

The simple approach is to simply allow yourself to throw anyone out who annoys anyone and be the judge of when that annoyance is strong enough to enforce that.

I would go with that - the organizer can throw out whoever they want (even without reason). I think society already has a code of conduct. If conferences feel the need to add an extra one, it shows that they tend to think the worst about people, and they have been overtaken by SJW framing.

> This is a mechanism by which anyone could be expelled for saying anything someone else doesn't like

Now the trick is to make sure it's applied absolutely fairly and evenhandedly.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com