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. 🙂
33knowledge33's Blog 