On Thu, 21 Mar 2019 at 17:04, Rich Bowen <rbo...@rcbowen.com> wrote: > As alluded to, I am aware of people in our community who believe that we > have achieved this goal, and that any inference to the contrary is > crazy-making. I explicitly disagree with that stance. We have clearly > *not* achieved this goal, and I was laboring under the assumption that > this was known, to most of us. > > https://gifimage.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/it-is-known-gif-13.gif
I feel like this is a good opportunity to bring up (as I have brought up before) the fact that "meritocracy" was invented for the purposes of a satirical *dystopian* novel. in the novel, the moral lesson is that any attempt to build a meritocracy is doomed to failure because it presupposes that the people with power and status can be relied upon to fairly judge who ought to have power and status see https://kottke.org/17/03/the-satirical-origins-of-the-meritocracy or https://boingboing.net/2019/03/18/poes-law-for-oligarchs.html or for a longer take http://stet.editorially.com/articles/you-keep-using-that-word/ note: I am not saying ah we should abandon any effort to recognize people's contributions and commitment to our projects and the foundation. what I *am* saying is that it is unfortunate that in our effort to build a fair and equitable organization we have instrumentalized an idea from a satirical work of fiction that (as per my first email) has the opposite effect from that which is intended What various members of our community object to is simply discarding the > concept and not replacing it with something. What *I* object to is the > notion that if we just come up with another word for it, Everything Will > Be OK. To me, that's clearly nonsense. > yeah. I don't believe that either. but I do believe that the way we talk about who we are and what we do is important (and impactful) and that we should evaluate whether there is room for improvement Well, yes and no. It's great to be committed, but unless that leads to > contributions (not just code) then it does not advance the project. In > the end, we are running software projects, and warm feelings don't > advance these projects. *Actions* do. > it was a mistake for me to bring up the "committer" discussion. it's tangential. and it has been discussed a lot on the CouchDB lists. I don't want to muddy the waters here, so let's just stick to the meritocracy stuff :) I *think* that on this particular mailing list, you're preaching to the > choir. And that choir is notably much more diverse than the ASF at > large. The challenge is spreading this story to the larger congregation. > Particularly when certain vocal members of that congregation speak very > loudly against those efforts as being wasteful of time and volunteer > effort. > but in your first email, re people getting offended, you said: "I understand that these people exist, but citing them as representative seems weird." my experience attempting to bring this sort of thing "to the congregation" (i.e., members@) in the past is *the primary reason* I burnt out and took hiatus for as long as I did. it was extremely exhausting. being challenged by multiple people on every little point. being drawn into long, circular, unproductive, and hostile arguments. having to manage other people's emotions/outrage/flames traumatizing too, to be honest it is ironic (and bitterly unfair) that this sort of work often has to be done by the people who have a material stake in what is being dismissed and who are already exhausted/traumatized from all the times they've had these sorts of conflicts before I don't know what to do, to be honest. I don't have the emotional or psychological health required to butt heads on members@ anymore perhaps a good first step would be to update the material the ComDev project is responsible for? phase out the word "meritocracy" (and maybe add a note that acknowledges this change and gives a rationale). reframe our values and approach as per my last email. from there, we could move on to http://theapacheway.com/ (if Shane is up for it) and then the Apache website proper, Incubator, etc. let it percolate through
