On 2014-12-17 6:33 AM, Gervase Markham wrote:
Sheeri said something very interesting the other day. She suggested that
people wanting not to be exposed to views they disagree with were
demanding a form of privilege.
There's no "demand" here, and to put it in those terms is unproductive.
This is a request, made with the aim of facilitating discussions and
fostering relationships without detracting from Mozilla's mission.
To put it another way, there's a big, big difference between someone
actually posting to frustrate the growth of a kind and inclusive
community, and other people using "you aren't fostering a kind and
inclusive community" as a stick to beat someone with unpopular opinions.
What it actually means in that context is usually "I've taken offence".
Or, alternatively, "I am hurt by this."
Your argument would likely be true if we lived in a world without
deep-seated, longstanding structural inequalities, but that's not where
we are. Power and privilege inequities aligned along political, racial
and religious lines are real, and felt intensely by people who care
intensely about those inequities. Many of whom are, unsurprisingly,
Mozillians, who feel hurt - and I don't mean "offended", I mean
"demeaned" - when discussions cross those lines.
This sucks for a lot of reasons, and one of them is that it's really
hard to know where those lines are because we're human don't know each
other perfectly, so people who care about one thing end up hurting
friends and colleagues inadvertently. It's a shitty experience for
everyone, and one that - particularly in a public forum - is _incredibly
easy_ to get defensive and angry and reactionary about.
So, people do that because people and the inevitable reaction to that
happens because people, and now here we are at the end of a long road of
scorched and salted earth and everyone's rightly kind of gun-shy about
sending stuff to Planet that isn't an ISO spec or new feature or a party
that went great and hey isn't everything awesome.
We can do better. Not just to and by each other, but by recognizing that
Mozilla is a community of communities and acting on that. I think Planet
can play an central role in that, and this is a proposal for how we can
get there from here.
However, Ben Smedberg's recent post (which, it seems from Yammer, many
people thought was much more acceptable than other controversial
postings have been) was an invitation to participate in one's
religion. ("I'd like to invite my colleagues to Jesus Christ.") And
such invitations are incredibly rare on Planet - that's the only one I
know of.
Right, and my position is that we are collectively _much worse off_ as a
community for these invitations, and the conversations they'd spur,
being rare. An environment where there aren't any rules but for a bunch
of unspoken reasons nobody chooses to raise their voice is not in any
practical sense better than one where the rules say you can't. So let's
try some guidelines for how to make raising our voices something
constructive, that works and if we're a bit lucky, scales.
- mhoye
_______________________________________________
governance mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/governance
