Zlatan Todoric <[email protected]> writes: > In my opinion, and as Russ explained about becoming political is > basically unavoidable, I would be actually up for celebrating things > that can (should?) be worldwide celebrated - community celebrating Pride > Month is in my opinion a worldwide community. Celebrating specific > racial/national/religious things, I think that should be left out for > multiple reasons: nations change through history and if you celebrate > holiday of one nation, you can easily miss how it offends the other > nation, same goes for race and religion.
> So LGQBT, Software Freedom, Universal Healthcare, Basic Income etc - yes > (it affects all human kind) > Hispanic/Black/Jewish/Green/Orange/Blue things - no, because they are > specific to certain group and diversity statement is all-inclusive for > that purpose, no need to pinpoint specific groups. I wonder if this may be a cultural difference (and by saying that, I want to stress that means that I think different members of the project will arrive at different conclusions entirely in good faith, and there's no real objective right or wrong). For example, my employer (Dropbox, for what it's worth, but I think this is common among a lot of our peer companies) celebrates Black, Hispanic, and Asian and Pacific Islander months (and I'm pretty sure others that aren't occuring to me), along with things like Diwali, Ramadan, and Passover (and of course Christmas and Easter), all in different ways. These are generally self-organized by employees for whom these events are meaningful, they're entirely optional, and they focus on talking about food, heritage, art, personal history, and other similar things that vary in their specifics but unite us as humans. The point of this is to recognize that people are different and bring those differences to the workplace as part of their whole selves, people don't have to fit into a single model or mold, and learning about other people and the things they find meaningful is inherently interesting and broadens perspective and helps us all work together more smoothly. This is a fair amount of work (I don't know that Debian should try to tackle that many events unless members of our community are asking), and it does require a bit of effort to be thoughtful about how to organize such events, but I think it's valuable. But that's my cultural background; that's the sort of thing that I'm used to, so when it comes up in the Debian context, that's the spirit in which I take it. Other folks may have much different personal experiences and therefore may take it in different ways. This may be something that's literally never done in your workplaces or in your society, and thus something that seems strange or unnecessary. However, I *don't* think that saying we therefore shouldn't ever touch any of these topics is either workable or wise. Like it or not, humans are inherently political (political comes from the root word polis, or public life, which is unavoidable whenever there is a public). For people coming from a culture where this sort of acknowledgement is common, *not* acknowledging someone's meaningful celebrations is *also* a political statement, particularly if it's done because someone's culture is deemed "controversial." There is no easy default action here; we're a large enough project with a large enough community that we have to wrestle with this in one way or another. Anyway, personally I'd rather err on the side of *more* celebration of the diversity of people in the Debian project, including noting meaningful days and events for them, because I think it says something important about our community. It says that we're a world-wide community of people from a huge variety of backgrounds and interests, and that diversity is also reflected in our huge diversity of packages and the universality of our operating system. > That said, I like celebrations (good way to find out about different > cultures/things), so maybe, just maybe we could have these things still > being issued by Publicity Team but with some specific Headline Tag like > "Debian Diversity Celebration: Today we celebrate US Black Heritage" and > then some text about its history etc - that way it would be informative > and fun IMHO. This is, for what it's worth, roughly what US corporations tend to do. (Personally, I think we should always strive to be better than a typical corporation, not being much of a personal fan of capitalism, but they do spend a fair amount of time thinking about how to navigate these sorts of things among large numbers of humans who are forced together by something largely unrelated to their personal backgrounds.) -- Russ Allbery ([email protected]) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
