Donglegate: The Adria Richards Saga
I don’t know if you've heard the story of Adria Richards and her incident at PyCon. Basically, seated behind her two developers started making sexual comments using tech talk. They said something about Forking and a term Big Dongle.
Richards was pissed and decided to dish out some Internet Justice. She turned around, smiled and took the pictures of the two developers. She then proceeds to post it on her powerful Twitter page. 
From there, things went terribly south. The skinny guy on the left, not looking at the camera, got fired from his company due to the controversy. The guy has a family and was fired for making a dumb joke that she happened to hear. It was the action of smiling, a false pretense, and taking the picture that bothered me and gave me a sense that she had an agenda.
What is wrong with her?
This was where I think she wanted to make a crusade out of these two men. If you look and read everything she involved in, you will come across with the notion that she is a technology feminist. Like others, she feels that technology field is lacking women, and she’s right, but shaming two guys for making an inside joke comes across as being an extremist. It does more harm than good to her cause. Extremist actions have a way of giving people an excuse to shut the door on your cause.
Paragon Interrupt?
How about turning around and telling them that you were offended by their comment? Or at least tell them to lower their voices so you could hear the speakers on stage. Instead she decided to take the Renegade Interrupt, and post it on Twitter.
When will people understand that Twitter is evil? Stop tweeting shit, because it will get you fired.
The Internet was divided. Many women in the technology field and a few "white knights" came to her defense claiming that she had every right to do what she did. Other came down strongly against her after her actions cause the firing of one of the developers.
That was when Anonymous took action and hacked the company site that she worked for. This in turn forced them to fire her from her job. So, one poor judgment ended up with two people losing their jobs. I am torn on this. I didn't like the harmful things said to her via death threats and anti-female responses. There is no place for these comments anywhere. But, this crusader attitude is also troubling. Given my long period of time being on the Internet, via my blog, I can be accused of doing the same thing (such as my infamous Cheerleader blog and a few others I've deleted recently), so I can see where she's coming from. But, someone actually lost their job over this, and that changes everything.
Did she deserve to lose her job? Probably not. But, some people do believe this was just karma. While I don't think anyone deserved to lose their jobs over this, the company that she worked for did give a sound enough reason. Just have a talk with either employee and say, "Don't do that again."
End of Part 1
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