Hi RO,
Thanks - there’s a lot in here. I am grateful you surface these
concerns, I am sure many share them.I've tried to summarise your points
- if you feel I’m mis-representing them, please call me out.
1. You’re concerned that this change is a sop to the politically
militant, and that this is a slippery slope.
2. The proposal itself is cosmetic and does little or nothing to advance
diversity which you believe is not a problem in open source, at least
not relative to proprietary software development.
3. Focusing energy here is a distraction (or worse) to Mozilla as an
open source project.
On point 1, my perception is that you don’t disagree with the proposal
itself, but your concern is about the context it’s made in. My concern
is that “meritocracy” carries ambiguity and baggage, and that ambiguity
seems to extend even beyond the field of open source governance at this
point. Better, in my view, to be very clear about what we intend -hence
the wording of the proposal. My sincere hope is that people who believe
wholeheartedly in “meritocracy”, and conversely people who think it’s
become a harmful concept, would all agree with the proposed statement of
how authority should be distributed in the project. I invite you now,
and in future, to scrutinise the proposed wording to determine if you
feel a line is in danger of being crossed. i.e. does the wording conform
to what you consider good about “meritocracy”? Does it represent a good
system?
At the same time, I can easily understand many feel a strong affiliation
with the term itself. For 20 years, it has represented for many a new,
better way of collaborating and it’s possible to feel a great attachment
to it. I don’t have a good answer for that, and nor is there a neater,
tidier conception to offer.
On point 2, you say that the proposal is “window dressing”. Sure -
let’s call it that. But window dressing exists for a reason, doesn’t it?
It has a signaling function and serves to invite people in. That is
entirely the idea here: that “meritocracy” has become associated for
some with a less welcoming or open community. Let’s change that signal.
Thank you for pointing out that there are reasonable efforts underway to
boost diversity and accessibility. I hold these to be important in
debiasing this system. I don’t agree that open source projects are more
diverse than proprietary software development: it would appear that the
systems that exist in open source somehow exacerbate the problem of
diversity. Considering diversity in gender representation, data shows
open source lagging the rest of the industry. FLOSS 2013 [0] is
obviously rather old now, but more recent data [1] (what is now the
CHAOSS D&I working group of which Mozilla is a part [2]) appears to
confirm this too. I share your instinct that open source should be more
diverse, and yet, it does not seem to be.
On point 3, I’m not asserting the priority of this over other issues and
there may more important and/or more urgent issues to raise. If you wish
to make the case for them, please do so, but they remain other issues,
and we can certainly discuss more than one thing at once here. I take
this point as more of a meta-comment on governance, rather than anything
specific to this proposal. Reasonable?
Best regards,
Patrick
0. https://floss2013.larjona.net/results.en.html
1.
https://osleadershipsummit2017.sched.com/event/9Khn/diversity-in-open-source-projects-susan-wu-midokura-daniel-izquierdo-bitergia-nicole-rutherford-intel
2. https://github.com/chaoss/wg-diversity-inclusion
On 5/26/18 6:24 PM, recalcitrantowl via governance wrote:
Patrick,
You admit this is just window dressing. This would not address the problem
highlighted in the pull request study you cited. It is designed only to make
people feel better about themselves while doing little. To conform word choice
with popular political trends, nothing more.
There is no conflict between use of the word "meritocracy" and diversity. Open
source is inherently more meritocratic, diverse, and egalitarian than proprietary
software. I regularly work with developers from all over the world. There are reasonable
efforts underway through outreach and scholarships to boost diversity and accessibility.
This proposal goes beyond that though. There are some people with extreme political views bent on
changing language in pursuit of their own personal power. In exchange, they offer you the
opportunity to feel good that you are "doing something" about "diversity" by
conforming to their language policing. This is simply a ploy to cement the political authority of
the aforementioned movement. It does not advance diversity.
This movement is against meritocracy because they politically believe
meritocracy is inherently biased, more specifically that they are entitled to
their own power and influence within projects simply by virtue of having the
right political views. They use control of language and cooperation of
well-meaning people to achieve their power.
As you can see from the first reply to your comment, you will never completely
appease these people. Even in making your proposal you got called out for using
unapproved nomenclature. To them, short of putting them directly in charge as
dictators, there is nothing that will make Mozilla not systematically
oppressive, it will never be enough.
The line must be drawn here.jpg.
There is no compelling reason to change the usage of the word meritocratic in
the governance documents.
There are compelling reasons not to give into language policing, at best does
nothing to advance diversity, at worst it empowers a fringe group of
authoritarian radicals who are hell-bent on giving themselves power and
influence to dictate even more.
Mozilla already drove out it's CEO for having unapproved opinions, donates
money to far-left groups, and has adopted the consensus left solution to net
neutrality. No one seems to care what effect the previous might have on
viewpoint diversity. I still use Firefox though because it's good code, that is
what matters to me, not the virtue signaling.
No one has responded to a number of serious, systematical technical issues
raised in the previous post, here:
https://groups.google.com/d/msg/mozilla.governance/ckPh2OmLYqE/_pmRhRW8CQAJ.
At a certain point Mozilla will need to decide whether it's a open source
software project or a political organization.
RO
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