language discrimination

[phette23]

Jenn from Concentra emailed me recently about adding a phrase to the CoC about discrimination based on languages spoken. She pointed to this passage from the IASSIST CoC:

"English is the working language of IASSIST. However, at any events and among the members, everyone should feel welcome despite which language(s) they natively speak."
Here’s the reference URL: https://iassistdata.org/community/code-of-conduct/

Looking at ours, we do not specify language spoken in our list in the second paragraph. The smallest change would be to simply add "language spoken" to that list. We would then not be including the "English is the working language..." phrase, but I don't think that's very necessary (and there have been Code4Lib events in other countries where English is not the primary language).

[thatandromeda]

I actually think it's worth thinking a bit about the working language phrase. Conferences actually do inherently discriminate against people who don't speak (or don't fluently speak) their working language, unless they offer simultaneous translation services, which seems unlikely for c4l. I like the part about being explicitly inclusive of multilingualism among attendees, at conference socials, etc., and I appreciate your point that code4libs have operated in languages other than English, but I don't think it would be accurate to add "language spoken" to this list with no other changes.