*Important* message to our PIRATE community

We never thought we’d have to write this post

At PIRATE Summit we celebrate and encourage deep personal relationships. The whole conference experience is built around it and we always aim to create an open and safe environment for all our participants. We were proud to often hear from our participants that we’ve built something “special” and that the combination of the selected participants and our house rules with a clear focus on paying it forward create an unmatched inclusive and warm atmosphere. After this year’s edition our confidence has sadly been shaken.

We were shocked to receive a complaint regarding physical sexual harassment at our evening party. We take those allegations very seriously and immediately reached out to everyone we knew to be involved as a victim, offender or witness. These investigations surfaced at least one additional case of sexual harassment.

Although we knew that these issues exist across the board and especially in the tech world, we hadn’t had any case of harassment reported to us at any of our events before. As of yesterday it is at the top of our agenda and we are committed to preventing any further such incidents. Every case is one case too much.

In the cases we have just identified,

• We are in contact with the victims, offenders and known witnesses
• We will issue a ban for the offenders for all of our future events
• We will support the victims in all steps going forward

We don’t have experience with how to deal with harassment cases yet. In the next weeks and months we will seek advice and define procedures and policies on how to deal with this issue going forward. This will most likely include a code of conduct for everybody participating at the event (incl. speakers, volunteers, service providers and our core team).

This is an issue we hoped we would not have to face in the PIRATE community. It completely contradicts the values we stand for.

If you have ever had a bad experience regarding sexual harassment at PIRATE Summit or if you ever witnessed it, we encourage you to come forward and let us know immediately. Please reach out to our founders Manuel (manuel@pirate.global) and/or Till (till@pirate.global), or our colleague Helen (helen@pirate.global). Of course we guarantee you absolute confidentiality.