Computer. Computer ? Computer :-( Now you understand.
Let's go to computer anonymous.

This Wednesday a friend lamented that they felt alienated from their programming community. They had the temerity to ask to be called a woman rather than a girl, or more accurately, asking to be called an adult rather than a child. Predictably, and despite being a polite request, this resulted in a shitstorm of abuse and cries of ‘Misandry!’ online. This was the final push they needed to abandon the toxic mailing lists and meetups. This left a void waiting to be filled, and so plans began to bubble up on Twitter:

‘now that I’ve alienated myself from the […] community, where do I go for my community love?’

‘lets make our own, it will be called “super code buddies”, we eat a burrito, then drink to forget’

‘a language-agnostic dorks meetup would be very relevant to my interests. Happy to help make it happen!’

‘we can call it “computer anonymous”’

It seemed like a good idea, so I pushed a tiny manifesto to GitHub and asked for help — it seemed easier than setting up a mailing list.

The Plan

This might be the group for you if you want to meet socially conscious nerds to talk about interesting things. This is not an entrepeneurial meetup, nor is it networking: It is a support group.

Imposters Welcome

This is a support group. No-one knows what they are doing.

If you’re worried about not being computer enough, come.

If your day job isn’t code, come.

If you think you’re an imposter, come.

This isn’t a group of experts, just people.

We are interested in the social and technical problems.

We want to include those alienated by the existing meetings and communities, which means keeping out the ones unwilling to act like decent human beings. To be explicit rather than implicit, we wrote a code of conduct.

Don’t harass people. Don’t make exclusionary jokes. Don’t even make them “ironically”.

We want to be inclusive; we don’t welcome homophobic, racist, transphobic, or sexist behavior, amongst others.

We think feminism is a good thing; we think brogramming is a bad thing.

Although we’re meeting in a pub, there is no expectation or pressure to drink alcohol. Don’t question anyone’s choice of drink.

Within a day, we had fifty people register an interest, and as of today, we’ve made over a hundred commits, and more than twenty pull requests, but there is still a lot of work to do. We’re working on how to reach people outside the tech bubble, and refining the code of conduct.

If you’re about in East London on Thursday the 3rd of October, come and say hello. More remarkably, if you’re in Berlin, Portland (Maine), or San Francisco, there is a meeting happening soon. Austin and Minneapolis are next, and if you’d like to start a group nearer you, fork the GitHub repository and send us a pull request.

It hasn’t been a week yet, we’ve yet to have the first meeting, so who knows if it will work out. That isn’t going to stop us from trying.

Edit: Since writing this post last night, Boston, MA and Austin TX have been started.