Ben Burton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > As for secrecy, I find your objections interesting. The debian-women > project has been making great efforts to actively improve transparency > of processes and access to relevant documentation throughout debian.
They have? I thought they just posted "bugfixes" for using the "wrong" gender in examples. (Seriously, I've seen a bit more from reading blogs, but the bugs are the most visible act so far.) > Immediate examples that come to mind include their detailed articles on > the NM process, the new mentoring programme that they are developing and > a growing collection of entry-level articles on packaging and bug > squashing. Where are these articles posted? As a package sponsor, it could be a useful resource for me and my maintainers. I didn't find them anywhere obvious on http://www.debian.org/devel/join/ I didn't find "the new mentoring programme" either. I remember being told some time ago that a mentor course would be announced, but now you mention it, I don't recall ever seeing it. > As for their own processes, they use a public mailing list, > a public IRC channel, post regular summaries of off-list activity and > have regular online meetings whose minutes are publicly posted. Their > goals and guidelines are publicly available on their website. Doesn't > entirely smack of secrecy to me. Both their list and IRC judge you and if they consider you a "troll" then there is a secret silence against you (again endorsed in the last IRC meeting, it seems). You don't have to fight flamewars with your critics, but you should respond to them, even if only dismissively. Hell, the effort I've put in to trying to persuade debian-women should suggest I'm not just trolling. If anything, it's debian-women who are carrying out classic troll "asymmetric infowar" on the rest of debian with their "ignore those who don't agree" approach. As to meeting minutes, I think posting them on a wiki on an alioth site and not bothering to link them into the meeting news item (directly or even within 3 clicks, as far as I can tell) is a bit better than putting them in a locked filing cabinet in an unlit downstairs toilet (and so on, go read Douglas Adams) but not much. It would do everyone good to read these minutes actually: http://women.alioth.debian.org/wiki/index.php/English/IRC16January2005 Notice that most of the points under how to avoid being sexist haven't actually been done yet. There are members of single-sex linuxchix chapters active in the subproject too. While it's unconstitutional for debian to demand that debian-women support other excluded groups, we should request this subproject stops discriminating. Their list charter still excludes purely on sex and it looks like being female is the only criteria for the "Debian Women Weekly News" (and do we need yet another publication modelled on the US tabloid "Weekly World News"?). In the detailed section, on the first question, it looks like debian-women still hasn't done basic research on the scale of the problem, overestimating the number of active DDs by about 150. That's a basic fact on every vote in http://www.debian.org/vote/ isn't it? (And no, there's not 1100 maintainers either, http://www.debian.org/devel/people suggests there are around 1400 of them.) I'll stop there, as it's not really useful to continue, but debian-women really looks like it needs slight reform, more people, more publicity and SMART action plans if it's going to do good work. (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, Time-limited.) > And as for accountability: who do you want them made accountable to? > Ah, the DPL, which would be.. well, you. Mmmm. Accountable != run by. The DPL can't force them to act and general exclusion/demography questions seem appropriate for the leader, don't you think? -- MJR/slef My Opinion Only: see http://people.debian.org/~mjr/ Subscribed to this list. No need to Cc, thanks. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
