LinuxCon + CloudOpen + ContainerCon NA 2015

The tone and tenor of community conversations is a large part of whether a community succeeds, yet that’s a hard concept to model and understand. We’ll use the “Defcon Insult Scale for CONversations", or DIScon, which ranks responses from mildly insulting to abusive, to examine and classify key signifiers of uncivil behavior. Moving on, we'll tackle more subtle forms of riling folks up (ways you can assume ignorance, belittle people, and/or just be condescending).

Once we’ve examined “high DIScon” situations, we’ll talk about why they make for unpleasant communities, and why that’s bad. At this point it’s not uncommon for a host of objections to be raised, so we'll "debunk" some of those together.

Finally, we'll look at steps we can take to reduce the “DIScon level” of our communities and why that's critical for FOSS's survival.