Updated. Re: | if you want to publicly address these people ← if people are addressed offline in public, I suspect you can dress it up with the appropiate social grace. But, we’re talking about behavior here (and entrepreneurs have exploits they’re already proud of, like hackers have hacks, and free riders aren’t actively malicious), and I feel that dressing it up with the same grace would actually backfire by not changing (or even harming) the reward structure of the behavior.
Yeah. Words can have different connotations for different people. I guess the solution to this is “tabooing” the words, and just describe it shortly for what it is. Like:
“Recently we have noticed that there are people (and it’s not just an isolated incident or two) who come to our meetups to simply ask others for free work on their private projects, or even to contribute money. This is not cool; this is not why we are here. These people try to exploit us as a free resource, without providing anything in return. If someone approaches you at our meetup with a similar request, feel free to tell them that such behavior is not welcome.”
Could be expressed better, but the idea is to make it descriptive, make it short, and have an organizer announce it as an official policy at the beginning of a meetup.
Updated. Re: | if you want to publicly address these people ← if people are addressed offline in public, I suspect you can dress it up with the appropiate social grace. But, we’re talking about behavior here (and entrepreneurs have exploits they’re already proud of, like hackers have hacks, and free riders aren’t actively malicious), and I feel that dressing it up with the same grace would actually backfire by not changing (or even harming) the reward structure of the behavior.
Yeah. Words can have different connotations for different people. I guess the solution to this is “tabooing” the words, and just describe it shortly for what it is. Like:
“Recently we have noticed that there are people (and it’s not just an isolated incident or two) who come to our meetups to simply ask others for free work on their private projects, or even to contribute money. This is not cool; this is not why we are here. These people try to exploit us as a free resource, without providing anything in return. If someone approaches you at our meetup with a similar request, feel free to tell them that such behavior is not welcome.”
Could be expressed better, but the idea is to make it descriptive, make it short, and have an organizer announce it as an official policy at the beginning of a meetup.