NorthSec strives to be an inclusive, friendly, and welcoming community to all people. As a part of our ongoing efforts to promote safer spaces in the tech fields, we:
- explicitly required all attendees, speakers, and sponsors, to adhere to our Code of Conduct during registration.
- assigned staff members to act as contacts for any reports that the attendees might have.
- reminded our attendees during each major announcement, both to follow the CoC and to report anything that might occur to us, whether it is via Discord, email, phone, or in person.
We take our code of conduct seriously and in the spirit of transparency, we’re publishing a summary of the reports we received this year.
We appreciate those reports, and we encourage anyone who witnesses a code of conduct violation to report it via the methods listed on https://nsec.io/code-of-conduct. NorthSec 2023 had two potential code of conduct incidents reported to the organizers. Anonymized details of these reports are below:
Following NorthSec 2023, here is an anonymized list of CoC-related incidents that occurred during the event:
- During Thursday’s party, two men displayed inappropriate behavior towards a volunteer, and as a result, they were expelled from the conference the next day when they were found.
- During Thursday’s party, a participant and their friend were approached by an unknown man, and after leaving their drinks unattended, one became highly intoxicated, raising suspicions of a non-consensual substance being introduced into their drink. This was a clear violation of our code of conduct, and the attendee suspected of the violation would have been asked to leave if they were able to be found. We are still investigating this issue and are looking into ways to make sure this does not happen again.
As we already mentioned, this report is anonymized and published for the sake of maintaining transparency, and to encourage folks in our community to report incidents that might disrupt the atmosphere we are passionate about.