Just a quick reminder that in just over a week we will be hosting the [Community Leadership Summit 2012](https://www.communityleadershipsummit.com/) in Portland, Oregon on from **Sat, July 14, 2012 – Sun, July 15, 2012**. The event happens the weekend before the [OSCON](https://www.oscon.com/oscon2012) conference, so this is a great opportunity to attend both events.

The *Community Leadership Summit 2012* brings together community leaders, organizers and managers and the projects and organizations that are interested in growing and empowering a strong community.

This **entirely free** event pulls together the leading minds in community management, relations and online collaboration to discuss, debate and continue to refine the art of building an effective and capable community. We have over **300** people registered, and we would love to see you there too!

At the heart of *Community Leadership Summit 2012* is an open unconference-style event in which everyone who attends is welcome to lead and contribute sessions on any topic that is relevant. These sessions are very much discussion sessions: the participants can interact directly, offer thoughts and experience, and share ideas and questions. These unconference sessions are also augmented with a series of presentations from leaders in the field, panel debates and networking opportunities.

## Joining Us

You can find out more details about [where the event is](https://www.communityleadershipsummit.com/travel-hotel/) and [how it works](https://www.communityleadershipsummit.com/about/) as well as seeing the [registered attendance list](https://www.communityleadershipsummit.com/attendees/). If you are interested in joining us, it is an entirely free event, but ask you to [register here](https://www.communityleadershipsummit.com/register/).

## Schedule and Running Sessions

You can see the [schedule for the event here](https://www.communityleadershipsummit.com/schedule/). Remember, this is an unconference, so you the attendees are welcome to propose and add sessions to the event.

**All session leaders will be provided with a free print copy of my book, [The Art of Community](https://www.artofcommunityonline.org/) (while stocks last).**

This year we are also including a series of 15 minute plenary presentations that will happen after lunch on each day. These plenaries are designed to present interesting techniques, learnings, and case studies that will be of interest to community managers and leaders.

These plenaries include:

* Jose Palafox – Growing Event Attendance
* Donnie Berkolz – Assholes are killing your project
* Karsten Wade / Guy Martin – Open Source Consultants UNITE!
* Jono Bacon – Gamification Of Community
* Greg Dunlap – Project Managing a Community Project
* Rachel Luxemburg – Community is Universal: The Formation of a Crisis Community

You can see the plenaries listed on the [schedule](https://www.communityleadershipsummit.com/schedule/).

## Sponsorship

Many thanks to our sponsors for supporting the Community Leadership Summit 2012!

## See You There!

I hope to see you all there, and look forward to meeting many of you at the pre-CLS social event the on Fri 13th July at *Spirit of 77 500 NE Martin Luther King Jr Blvd. Portland, OR 97232*. 🙂

**Find out more at [https://www.communityleadershipsummit.com](https://www.communityleadershipsummit.com)**!

This is a long post, so to keep you reading and engaged, I am going to intersperse amusing kitten photos to keep this ball rolling. Hang in there, folks. 🙂

We have a slippery slope forming in some communities (fortunately, I am not referring to Ubuntu here) surrounding how to handle cases of community members verbally offending other community members. Some of these communities are trying to build policies around this in the same way we write software to solve problems; by trying to codify what is considered offensive and then form policy protections around this.

This is a mistake.

Most communities are too culturally diverse to enforce any kind of detailed policy that defines specific areas of concern that can be mapped en-mass to everyone. We all have different values, interests, senses of humor, and cultural norms that combine and make a single all-encompassing policy impractical. What offends one person may not offend somebody else, so if you blacklist particular topics of conversation or content, you may be inhibiting the very free and open communication that invigorates so many communities.

As an example, I am pretty easy going when it comes to jokes or criticism. I welcome all and any criticism (as I am sure some of you will seek to test in the comments 😉 ), and I have always believed you should be able to poke fun at yourself and be open to others poking fun at you too. Jokes about my pasty British skin, lack of hair, funny accent, my tendency to always wear flip-flops, my terrible taste in music, crappy cooking abilities, my inability as a man to see things my wife asks me to find in the fridge, my political opinions, and more are all open season. Reading back over the last (uncomfortably long) sentence, these topics of conversation cover race, gender, visual appearance, lifestyle choices, politics and more. I would never want to restrict the ability for people to talk to me in a loose, fun, and social manner, and poking fun at me is part of this. Likewise, I strongly abhor a document that tells me I can’t comment on these topics in a community environment or poke fun at others too.

Importantly, such jokes and comments are only acceptable if they are respectful. Someone can say the most critical or personal thing they like to me if it is delivered to me on a foundation of respect. A minor jibe or comment that is delivered in a disrespectful or passive aggressive manner is unacceptable. The topic is not what matters, it is the *tone* and *social context* that sets apart thoughtful satire and commentary from disrespectful and aggressive content.

Saying this, I understand that some people will be offended by such comments. Just because I don’t get offended doesn’t mean everyone else should share this view. This is why social context is so important; when I am hanging out with my friends and I know their boundaries, we can be loose and fiery with each other, but when I am in a more formal business setting or with people who I don’t know, it is better to be more conservative.

The nature of *offense* is fundamentally born from a mismatch of social expectations.

Typically what happens in cases of of someone getting offended is that Person A makes a comment to Person or Audience B that the latter considers to be offensive. This usually happens when Person A thought the comment would be OK, but Person or Audience B did not feel it was acceptable. In the majority of these cases Person A was not trying be malicious or disrespectful, it was merely a social expectations mismatch. If Person A *was* deliberately trying to be disrespectful then this is obviously unacceptable.

An important point here is that sometimes people get offended and that is OK. Social mismatches happen. Just because someone gets offended doesn’t mean they have the right to shut someone else down. The rights and views of Person A are just as important as the rights and views of Person or Audience B.

If we try to construct communities with policies and governance that restrict collaboration and communication to protect against “potential areas of offense”, then we gut our communities of the freedoms that help us thrive, and instead instill bland, mundane, and restrictive environments for fear of offending someone. Freedom comes with responsibility; all community members should be respectful and responsible in their conduct, but it is also irresponsible to presume that just because you are offended, the wider community needs to change.

A related problem here too, is that some folks conflate *harassment* and *offense*.

An off the cuff comment might offend someone, but that isn’t harassment. Harassment is a repetitive, personalized and targeted act: it is a repeated anti-social set of instances targeted towards a particular person. If someone yells at me on my blog about me doing a terrible job, I might be offended, but if they do this every day, targeting me personally…I would consider this to be harassment.

I am OK if someone offends me, but I am not OK if someone harasses me and I fully endorse any and all efforts to stamp out harassment. Our communities should be welcoming, diverse, and positive environments. We should never tolerate harassment, but we should also not confuse offense for harassment.

Thanks for reading such a long post, and I hope the kittens helped relieve the boredom. In a nutshell, sometimes it is OK to get offended; social mismatches happen. What is not OK is deliberately disrespectful conduct and harassment.