Hi Mike, On 12/12/14 16:48, Mike Hoye wrote: > As part of a Planet refresh [1] planned for the new year and aiming for > end-Q2, the Planet peers are going to be revising the somewhat-sparse > Planet documentation and policies [2].
A visual redesign is a fine thing, although those who consume via feed readers (which may be many) probably don't care if the design is 80s, 90s, or 2020s. However, I would say that a policy review is a separate thing to a visual redesign, and we should not tie the two together. If we want to have one, let's have one. But let's not end up in situations like "we want to ship the new-look Planet now, so I'm wrapping up discussion on policy issue X". > While part of the refresh will be technical - clearing out dead feeds, > making search work right, a mobile theme, etc - we'll also be proposing > some changes to how feeds are included on Planet. Our aim is to advance > the core Mozilla mission and foster an inclusive, diverse community > around that mission without denying anyone the freedom to seek out > like-minded Mozillians and speak to things they care deeply about. I'm all for Mozilla being an inclusive, diverse community. However, the fact must be faced that _in_a_Mozilla_context_, the pressures to make this community less diverse (by ostracising or silencing those with views of which they disapprove) have all come from those areas of our community which claim to champion diversity. How is this contradiction to be resolved? > In short: lots of Mozillians care passionately about non-Mozilla stuff; > sometimes that's crafting and music and sometimes it's activism, > politics and religion. > > While we don't want to see Planet become a place where people aren't > free to express themselves, we also don't want Planet to become a > platform that alienates Mozillians who feel differently, if just as > strongly, on those same issues. I think whether you can achieve that goal or not depends very strongly on whether you can get community agreement that merely being confronted with an alternative opinion is not an occasion for feeling alienated. If we can agree on that, there is hope. If the mere fact that an alternative opinion meets one's eyeballs leads to alienation, then the content feed you are curating must, inevitably, have a monotonicity of opinion in order to avoid alienating the readers it has left (which will be those who share that opinion). > To that end, we are going to propose that Planet have a participation > policy including words to the effect that "in discussing contentious or > personal topics outside of Mozilla's mission, please consider > invitations to conversation welcome, position statements not, and > exercise your judgement with the growth of a kind and inclusive > community in mind." The difficulty with this is that either it's meaningless, or it's code for something else. I don't know anyone who has ever posted on planet with the aim of making the Mozilla community less kind and less inclusive. So if the words mean what they mean on the surface, it wouldn't change anything. If what it really means is "don't post anything about things which one vocal section of our community will take offence at", then we should say that. But it seems like we're trying to avoid going down that road. > Further, that we ask Planet's participating authors to: > > - add a "mozilla" tag to posts that are relevant to Mozilla, so that > it's explicit that their inclusion in Planet is deliberate, and > - when addressing the community on a topic others may find challenging, > that there be a brief disclaimer at the top of those posts outlining the > contents. We intend to provide boilerplate text and HTML snippets people > can paste into posts to make that as painless as possible, though people > can always roll their own. The problem with this second requirement is that it presupposes that there is a distinction. In some cases, that might be true - it's unlikely that Middle Eastern politics would naturally come in to a discussion on a Mozilla topic, unless perhaps it was about l10n or regional communities - but in many cases it's not. To speak from my own perspective (which is easiest) - being a Christian and following Jesus is inextricably bound up in who I am as a person. It's not an activity I do at particular days or times, it's not something I think about in discrete sections or chunks. In short, it's not a "separable" part of my life. The authority claims of Christ over the world are total, which means (among other things) that following him pervades everything a Christian does. So on my blog, I don't feel I have "religious" blog posts and "non-religious" blog posts. This is reflected in the fact that, although my blog has tags (including a "mozilla" tag), it doesn't have a "religion" tag - because that would suggest a separation where none exists. So that leaves me wondering: how would this work in practice? Are we going to have a policy that any post which mentions the name of Jesus must come with a trigger warning? Gerv _______________________________________________ governance mailing list [email protected] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/governance
