I invite you to read Mike Swift’s blog if you haven’t already. http://news.mlh.io/when-jokes-go-too-far-09-19-2015
“Don’t build for the sake of prizes, build something you truly enjoy building!”. At the end of the opening ceremony, I felt so inspired I could hack for a week. I was in high spirits, exhilarated, and elevated. Prior to this Hackathon, I stayed up on weeknights to finish my assignments so that I could come and enjoy myself.
After the ceremony, my team and I began hacking away. I would occasionally visit the “Hack the North” Facebook group to participate in discussions. I came across a post which was clearly making a reference to the recent news story about Ahmed. The boy was arrested for bringing a homemade clock, mistaken for a bomb, to school. I commented “Yeah my clock is the bomb come check it out”.
An hour later, Mike Swift came looking for me. He took me to a room and told me my comment violated the code of conduct. I tried to justify I was making a relevant joke. He said that the issue was someone had reported that he/she felt unsafe in the environment. He showed me the code of conduct that highlighted a “no harassment in safe zone area” concept. I proceeded to apologize, and I cooperated with him because I felt it was the right thing to do.
Swift left and came back fifteen minutes later with security guards to ask me to leave the premises entirely. This was a decision made by the organizers that I will be expelled from the current event. “If repeated patterns of offence occur in future Hackathons, we will have to ban you from MLH forever,” said Swift.
All this happened within approximately 1 hour, including the time since posting my joke comment. Personally I felt the Swift team made the decision too abruptly and could have used more time to consider my feelings.
I’ll likely stop going to MLH events considering how inappropriately they handle topical humour. I think I’ll focus on AngelHack and Wearhacks instead.
Hey man, I totally understand what you felt. A few days back I was given a write-up at work just cause I said something as a joke and people around me did not take it that way. I would say that you should not totally boycott MLH events, instead learn from this experience and come back stronger. It took me a long time to accept what had happened as well, but I showed up on Monday morning anyway. I would say that it was an important experience for me and the one that I would never forget. Hope you take it that way too.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I think the lesson from this experience is that MLH is quick to jump to heavy-handed judgement, and therefore can’t be trusted. Boycotting their events seems like a perfectly reasonable response to their unreasonable response.
LikeLike
How Ironic that you were thrown out for the same thing Ahmed did.
LikeLike
What he fails to mention conveniently in this post is that the post prior to his said something along the lines of “actually we’re building a bomb, it just looks like a clock” . With these two together it is easy to see why the second comment was taken just as literally as the first one seeing as it directly referenced the explicit making of a bomb
LikeLiked by 1 person