Resources for safer conferences

laura
Industry
October 25, 2018

The MAAWG conference was held in Brooklyn a few weeks ago. Many positive discussions and sessions happened at the conference. But there was an incident of harassment during the conference where one participant assaulted multiple other attendees during late evening activities. I’m not going to speak too much to what happened as I wasn’t there. What I will say is that I am proud of my friends and colleagues who stepped up to make sure that the targets of the harassment made it safely to their rooms. I’m also pleased that the conference pulled the harasser’s badge and banned him from the conference in short order.

This incident did expose some issues with how the conference is collecting and handling code of conduct violations. But that’s nothing unusual. In fact, most good policies include the after-action report to look at ways to improve the process in the future. MAAWG is looking at how to handle things better, moving forward, and that’s what they should be doing.

There’s been much discussion about this across the industry since this happened and a number of people have asked for information and resources on how to handle incidents. As I’ve been participating in these discussions, I’ve found a number of sites that are useful resources. I’m using this post, primarily, as a way to document those resources and make it such that I have a single link I can send to men who ask me how they can help.

Resources

Wikis and FAQs

Conference anti-harassment from Geek Feminism. It collects policies from different conferences and talks about what works and what doesn’t.

Code of Conduct 101 from Ashe Dryden

Men who advocate for safer conferences.

The Code of Conduct Jess Noller from Python

Jim C. Hines, and John Scalzi both SF Authors

Other good resources

Actions to take

Why women don’t speak up: HBR and Ashe Dryden

Commentary

For myself, a lot of what I’m doing is sharing information with people in different fora. Some of them are public, like this blog post. Others are semi-private fora. Still others are one on one (or one on few) discussions. The group I co-founded, Women of Email is also starting to look into this problem, and I am the sponsoring board member. Given how much success we’ve had getting women speaking at conferences, I’m confident we will make a difference.

Through the course of these discussions, I’ve had a number of men ask what they can do. They want to help but they don’t know how to fix things. I deeply respect this position, but, women don’t know how to fix this either. We don’t have the answers. What I think would really help is for men to start educating themselves and other men. Stop asking women to shoulder the burden of telling you what to do on top of of being targets, of navigating reporting, of dealing with the personal and professional fallout and of figuring out how not to be targeted again.

I know there are other resources out there, I’ve seen them. But I don’t always bookmark what I should. These pages are ones I’ve found helpful over the last few weeks and others I remember. What resources have you found to be helpful and would like to share?

October 2016: The Month in Email

We’ve returned from London, where I spoke at the Email Innovations Summit and enjoyed a bit of vacation. My wrap-up post also mentions an article I wrote for the Only Influencers site, which looks at questions I get asked frequently: “Why does spam make it to the inbox and our legitimate marketing email doesn’t? Should we just copy their tactics?”

In industry news, Yahoo caught our attention for two surprising moves: disabling forwarding and — much more disturbing — creating software for intelligence agencies to search customer email.
Some legal updates this month: The Second Court of Appeals upheld an earlier ruling that companies are in fact liable for the activities of their affiliates, including spam and fraudulent claims. This is important, as we often see spammers and cybercriminals use affiliates to distance themselves from these activities. We also saw another fine assessed for a violation of CASL, and noted with appreciation the transparency and thoughtful process that the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) demonstrates in explaining their actions.
Another excellent report is the one created by the Exploratorium to explain their recent experience with being phished. It’s a good piece to share with your organization, in that it reminds us that these cybercriminals are exploiting not just our technology but our trust-based connections to our friends and colleagues. It’s important to raise awareness about social engineering as a part of information security. And speaking of email security, we were delighted to note that André Leduc received the 2016 J.D. Falk award this month at M³AAWG for his excellent work on this topic. It’s a fitting legacy to our friend, J.D., who died five years ago this month. We miss him.
Finally, we’d be remiss in observing Halloween without a post about zombies. Feel free to read it aloud in your spookiest voice.

2018 JD Falk Award … a mailing list

It’s M³AAWG time. Even though we’re not there, I’m getting regular updates from friends and colleagues who are there. Yesterday, was the presentation of the 2018 JD Falk award. The award recognises “a particularly meritorious project undertaken by a dedicated individual or group reflecting the spirit of volunteerism and community building.” In this case, the award went to a group of people on the “BEC mailing list.”

2016 J.D. Falk Award

André Leduc received the 2016 J.D. Falk award this week at the Paris meeting of M³AAWG. He was recognized for spearheading two distinct projects.
The first was the Operation Safety Net – Best Practices to Address Online, Mobile, and Telephony Threats This 76 page report was written by global security experts. One of the major goals of the report was to discuss security in language accessible to policy makers and management. The report, newly updated in 2015, is available at the M³AAWG website. Making technical language accessible is, to my mind, one of the most important parts of getting security recommendations implemented.
In addition to his work in making security recommendations accessible, André was the lead architect behind the Canadian Anti-Spam Legislation. This legislation has greatly reduced the amount of spam received by Canadians. According to Leduc, CASL has improved permission practices by senders outside of Canada.
Congratulations to André.