[will_critchlow]

I know Jane well IRL and count her as a friend.

My company also runs digital conferences and she's frequently spoken at our events - and I'm very thankful it wasn't one of ours where the sleazeball stuff happened.

From a purely pragmatic perspective (i.e. what, as organisers, can we do about sleazeballs) I'm fascinated by two aspects of my own personality:

- on the one hand, I skew towards believing that individuals are entirely responsible for their own actions. If someone's a sleazeball at one of our events, that's entirely his fault (I would obviously react badly if I witnessed it or knew it was happening in real time)

- on the other hand, I'm into game theory and behavioural economics and I wonder how we can structure things so that we reduce the occurrence of this kind of thing. I'd love to hear ideas for tactical things conference organisers can do to filter and constrain ridiculous behaviour...

[badams76]

I think not having booth babes and strippers would be a great start. It would sure cut down on the males of our species being subconsciously primed for sexual thoughts.

[will_critchlow]

Well, we don't have booths, never mind booth babes...

I'm more talking about the kind of harassment that Jane describes happening in the bar / at breaks in the conference etc.

[gldalmaso]

Write an open letter to the industry showing your disapproval and intention of not inviting the speaker again.

That way the sleazeballs will acknowledge that their atitude is hurting his image.

[will_critchlow]

To clarify / reiterate - the issues didn't happen at our conference (I double-checked with Jane on this!). I'm more interested in pre-emptive things to help make sure it never does happen at our conferences in future.