View source for Biologigaragen/Labitat/KopenLab sexual harassment, bullying and mobbing. | Geek Feminism Wiki

For a long time, starting in Novemeber of 2013 and continuing through to the current period, Jen Kotila has been sexually harassed, bullied and mobbed by leadership within three organizations that are closely connected; [https://labitat.dk/ Labitat], a hackerspace in Copenhagen, [http://biologigaragen.org/ Biologigaragen], an open biology lab that is a part of Labitat and [http://kopenlab.dk/ KopenLab] , an organization set up to facilitate a festival/conference for the groups at [http://esof2014.org/ ESOF 2014 in Copenhagen] and also meant to serve as an umbrella organization that would run an expansion of Labitat and Biologigargen to include other organizations in a larger space.

The campaign of harassment has mainly been a few individuals who have been involved in all the groups who have been at the front of the harassment, but the organizations themselves have also been at fault for not taking the necessary steps to prevent harassment occurring and not responding in a sensible way when it was brought forward. Also, as the organizations were almost entirely made up of white men, it was quite easy to incite mobbing within the community and turn opinion against the complainant.

The Kopenlab Festival project is over, having been successfully occupied in protest. Jen succeeded in defeating the proposed expansion with Labitat community support, as it would have been economically disastrous for Labitat and Biologigargen anyway.

Jen has now been formally excluded from Biologigaragen by its board, which is made of her primary harassers and their close friends.

Labiat has expelled all four primary actors involved, including Jen, pending community consensus approval. The grounds for expelling her are her "tone" and "making the organization look bad". This vote will occur in Labitat on Nov. 23. [https://labitat.dk/wiki/Membership_information Anyone can become a member of Labitat ]and have a say in the decision as the space is fully anarchistic with no barrier to entry (which is part of the problem, see [http://missionlocal.org/2013/12/combating-sexual-harassment-in-tech/ the case of the harassment in the similarly (un)structured lab Noisebridge]).

An overview of the harassment can be seen [https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-DPJhdE71IyXx_Du9TlV5b2UvVvwkLhgOnVO-06pBCY/edit here.]

Because of this and because she realized that this was a systemic problem in tech and hacking, she has created an DIY, non-transactional, collaborative organization designed to prevent discrimination and harassment in open knowledge organizations: [http://OpenInclusivity.org OpenInclusivity.org]

Since Jen is the only one who updates this wiki, it is about as biased towards her views as it can be.
[[Category:Incidents]]
[[Category:2014]]
[[Category:Hackerspaces]]
[[Category:Sexual harassment]]