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?

Yahoo disabled forwarding

Al posted about this over on his blog earlier this week. Yahoo has disabled the ability to forward email from one Yahoo account to an email account on a different system.
There is, of course, all sorts of speculation as to why forwarding has been disabled including speculation this has to do with holding on to accounts during the Verizon purchase. It’s certainly possible this is the case.
However, forwarding email is hard. Forwarding email on a large scale can result in spam blocks and delivery problems. It’s such an issue M3AAWG published a forwarding best practices document. It’s possible that Yahoo is making some changes on the back end to better implement the best practice recommendations. I don’t know, but it’s possible that Yahoo is telling the truth that they’re improving technology.

June 2015: the Month in Email

Happy July! We are back from another wonderful M3AAWG conference and enjoyed seeing many of you in Dublin. It’s always so great for us to connect with our friends, colleagues, and readers in person. I took a few notes on Michel van Eeten’s keynote on botnets, and congratulated our friend Rodney Joffe on winning the prestigious Mary Litynski Award.
In anti-spam news, June brought announcements of three ISP-initiated CAN-SPAM cases, as well as a significant fine leveled by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) against Porter Airlines. In other legal news, a UK case against Spamhaus has been settled, which continues the precedent we’ve observed that documenting a company’s practice of sending unsolicited email does not constitute libel.
In industry news, AOL started using Sender Score Certification, and Yahoo announced (and then implemented) a change to how they handle their Complaint Feedback Loop (CFL). Anyone have anything to report on how that’s working? We also noted that Google has discontinued the Google Apps for ISPs program, so we expect we might see some migration challenges along the way. I wrote a bit about some trends I’m seeing in how email programs are starting to use filtering technologies for email organization as well as fighting spam.
Steve, Josh and I all contributed some “best practices” posts this month on both technical issues and program management issues. Steve reminded us that what might seem like a universal celebration might not be a happy time for everyone, and marketers should consider more thoughtful strategies to respect that. I wrote a bit about privacy protection (and pointed to Al Iverson’s post on the topic), and Josh wrote about when senders should include a physical address, what PTR (or Reverse DNS) records are and how to use them, testing your opt-out process (do it regularly!), and advice on how to use images when many recipients view email with images blocked.

Policy is hard

We’re back at work after a trip to M³AAWG. This conference was a little different for me than previous ones. I spent a lot of time just talking with people – about email, about abuse, about the industry, about the ecosystem. Sometimes when you’re in a position like mine, you get focused way too much on the trees.

Of course, it’s the focusing on the trees that makes me good for my clients. I follow what’s going on closely, so they don’t have to. I pay attention so I can distill things into useable chunks for them to implement. Sometimes, though, I need to remember to look around and appreciate the forest. That’s what I got to do last week. I got to talk with so many great people. I got to hear what they think about email. The different perspectives are invaluable. They serve to deepen my understanding of delivery, email and where the industry is going.

One of the things that really came into focus for me is how critical protecting messaging infrastructure is. I haven’t spoken very much here about the election and the consequences and the changes and challenges we’re facing. That doesn’t mean I’m not worried about them or I don’t have some significant reservations about the new administration. It just means I don’t know how to articulate it or even if there is a solution.
The conference gave me hope. Because there are people at a lot of places who are in a place to protect users and protect privacy and protect individuals. Many of those folks were at the conference. The collaboration is still there. The concern for how we can stop or minimize bad behavior and what the implications are. Some of the most difficult conversations around policy involve the question who will this affect. In big systems, simple policies that seem like a no-brainer… aren’t. We’re seeing the effects of this with some of the realities the new administration and the Republican leaders of congress are realizing. Health care is hard, and complex. Banning an entire religion may not be a great idea. Governing is not like running a business.
Talking with smart people, especially with smart people who disagree with me, is one of the things that lets me see the forest. And I am so grateful for the time I spend with them.