Nearly a year and a half ago, an incident in the Ruby community inspired me to more vocally support and advocate for inclusive, safe, welcoming events in tech. Myself and others started by speaking to community and conference organizers about what they were doing to make their events an accurate reflection of not only what the community currently looked like, but where we wanted to see it go.
First, the basics: In case you missed it, Twitter has a feature called “block.” If you block someone on Twitter, that user can no longer interact with you.
When it made the original change, the company explained that it was to fix the fact that users can tell when they’ve been blocked, which it said meant there was “antagonistic behavior where people would see they were locked and be mad.” As Ashe Dryden
Update #1: I am looking for twitter employees to have a google hangout with about why this change has made marginalized people who use their service even less safe. If you are, or know someone who works at twitter, please email me.
As a longtime fan of The Setup, I'm super honored to be featured there. It was really fun to figure out what things I've come to rely heavily on and what annoys me with the current state of software and hardware. Check it out and read the full interview.
Quite regularly I'm asked about books that would be good to read to learn more about topics I discuss regularly, including intersectionality, feminism, womanism, and social justice. Thanks to the help of twitter and my ever-growing GoodReads list, here is a list for you. Many of the books can easily fit into more than one category, so may appear under multiple headings.
On a terrifyingly regular basis, incidents of bad behavior surface in the open source community. This can range from dismissiveness toward someone in a marginalized group, to outright hostility at conferences, to harassment and intimidation in the workplace, to physical violence and sexual assault in our community spaces. The scary thing here is that we only hear about them when they either happen in public or when the affected person comes forward, not all of them knowing what will happen when they do.
"I worry that focusing so much on the brogrammer stereotype means that people who don’t believe themselves to be brogrammers will not look at their own actions critically. Our culture has had these issues longer than brogrammers have been around."
Available for consulting to increase diversity and inclusion within businesses, communities, conferences, and other organizations. Find out more about consulting.
First, the basics: In case you missed it, Twitter has a feature called “block.” If you block someone on Twitter, that user can no longer interact with you.
When it made the original change, the company 
NPR picked up my article on 
