Proposition

[Martin Owens]

> There was actually a very interesting conversation about that very issue
> on the Ubuntu-women list a while back. One of the problems is that some
> women feel that they can become a target of harassment if they use their
>   full, real names. I know on IRC, since my whois has my real name, it
> has been quite common for me to get harassing PMs on freenode,
> especially if I'm hanging out on #ubuntu (which I rarely do anymore for
> that very reason.)

I pondered this problem for some time, the defensive position of
anonymity is useful but...

Ultimately we should be defending against and reporting any and all
abuse directly. If we knew the abusers real name than depending on the
seriousness of the problem we could take further action to stop them.

We should also try to defend our freedom to use our names without
fear; I think it's sad that there is no recourse built into our
community to deal with abuse; or at least not obvious enough.

We could also do with getting people who are on the launchpad list,
onto the mailing list and ultimately into the meetings and events, any
suggestions on how to do this too?

This btw doesn't apply to irc or any other thing and you could change
your launchpad name to Harry Jones and I'd never be able to tell if it
wasn't real (although this isn't advisable) You also have to consider
that your real name is supposed to be in your GPG key, if you have a
launchpad GPG key we can better identify who messages come from.

Best Regards, Martin Owens