>It should be low barrier and low risk for individuals to tell >"us"/"someone" when they feel uncomfortable. Hopefully with enough >detail to allow for remediation/change.
Riffing from Naomi, and others, about the worry that people might be both upset and not know how to proceed: We have enough clearly lovely people in the community that I wonder if we couldn't find a couple or more that could be identified as "ombudspersonesque" types on a per-conference basis. A person or persons, identified several times during the conference ,and with other directory information (email) one could go to with the guarantee of anonymity who could at a minimum listen and if desired try to constructively deal with the situation. I'll say that at my first conference I was somewhat startled by the back channel chatter. It took me a while to understand, parse, and not worry so much about it...and then to take some gems from it. -t