Several months ago, people raised the issues of some inappropriate comments made during various talks. The board worked on resolving those issues, and then proposed the creation of guidelines to have better ways to limit such inappropriate comments, as well as to answer similar issues that would be raised in the future.
The result is a document listing a set of guidelines to help speakers avoid offending the audience, in order to have the talks enjoyed by as
many people as possible: http://live.gnome.org/CodeOfConduct/SpeakerGuidelines
We would like to encourage everybody who will deliver a talk at a GNOME event, or who will represent GNOME with a GNOME talk at other events, to go read those guidelines!
Many thanks to Matthew Garrett for his initial work on this, and to the community for the feedback sent after we’ve published a draft of this document.