Hello JC, On Samstag, 27. April 2024 09:33:42 CEST JC Brand wrote: > On 2024/04/26 15:35, Jonas Schäfer wrote: > > On Freitag, 26. April 2024 13:01:12 CEST JC Brand wrote: > > > One can always come up with more categories of marginalized people, and > > > trying to enumerate all of them in a CoC is IMO impractical, while > > > mentioning only some of them can create the impression that some > > > categories of people are "more equal" than others. > > > > They are though, or should be anyway. People from marginalized groups are > > just that, marginalized. We as an organisation should do the extra effort > > to support individuals from these groups in order to allow them to be > > safe in our spaces, to live up to their potential and what they'd like to > > achieve and contribute. > > You're basically advocating for so-called positive discrimination (aka > affirmative action), which is a political position advocated for by > certain political groupings. > I'm on record from previous discussions in saying that I don't think a > supposedly neutral standards organization should be instrumentalized for > the furtherance of political programmes.
"supposedly" is the key word here. Neutrality does not exist. Let me paint you a picture (pun intended). In photography, an important parameter when baking a picture into something which can be viewed on screen is the so-called White Balance. Most of the time, it controls the shift between red and blue in a picture [^1]. White balance is normally configured by using a piece of plastic which is known to be "neutral grey" and asking the picture processor to calibrate on that. It will then shift the tint of the picture so that the sensor values in the area of the neutral grey card get converted to 50% gray in RGB. The same thing happens in brains, by the way. The (maybe) white wall in your room is by no means emitting "white" light in your direction: it is reflecting whichever colour your room lighting currently has, which is very unlikely to be what some standards committee has defined as neutral white. Now, does anyone remember that dress picture from a couple years back, which divided the internet on whether the dress was blue or golden? That was basically a white balance issue: without a point of reference for the brain to identify "gray" in the picture, people in different contexts will see different colours (because the white balance in your brain gets thrown off). It is the same with political neutrality. The XSF is not "neutral gray". Neutral gray, like neutral white, is an artificial construct which does not stably exist. The XSF is some different shade, but because of your context, it *looks* neutral gray to you [^2]. We accommodate military use (another highly "politically charged" topic) of our products: see for example XEP-0365, which specifies the use of XMPP over some NATO communication standard. This looks like neutral gray only if you live in or are affiliated with NATO countries and are not opposed to NATO or military in general. We have not intervened when people advocated for just ignoring marginalized groups in client development. This looks neutral gray only if you are not marginalized. Looking at the names (and I know that that is a really fuzzy way to look at things, but as a first order approximation it'll have to do) in our membership, it's almost exclusively US or EU. This looks neutral gray only if you are from the US or EU. I haven't been participating in summit recently, but when I did, it was almost all male-looking white people. This looks neutral gray only if you are a white male. > >> At the end of the day, the tiniest minority is the individual, and > >> requiring that we treat each individual with respect and courtesy is > >> enough, without having to refer to specific (sometimes politically > >> charged) categories. > > > > Could you clarify "sometimes politically charged"? > > There are politically contentious topics surrounding what constitutes > marginalized identities and how one (and society) should go about > accommodating them. > We're running the risk if introducing these politically divisive topics > into the XSF, thereby politicizing the organization which will likely > introduce the same divisiveness, acrimony and bitterness that > characterizes political debates. Oh, the division and bitterness is there. You currently just have the "luxury" to not see it, because the people who are divided away and get bitter are not joining and/or have left the XSF (yes, this is happening / has happened). [I said "you", instead of "we", above, because I in fact do see the division and bitterness. It takes place outside the XSF spaces for obvious reasons.] > I don't think this benefits the > organization or aids in the furtherance of standards development. I disagree. If standards are supposed to work for a wide variety of people, we as a standards organisation need to have representatives from a wide variety of people. This is currently clearly not the case. Of course, one may say that the bits on the wire don't care, and that is certainly true. But it matters what we make these bits do, and what these bits are capable of doing. For example, there is no way in XMPP to express your pronouns, or to do so selectively to a subset of your contacts. This is a very real use case of real people out there. Nobody has brought this use case up, and we need to ask ourselves why that is. This hinders growing the protocol, if growth is what you care about, and it hinders making it a viable alternative for real people to use. Please also consider reading the FAQ of that other CoC I linked earlier: https://www.contributor-covenant.org/faq/ Now please mind that I'm not advocating to become neutral gray. As I pointed out, I don't believe that neutral gray exists. Instead, we as an organisation need to be come conscious about that and we need to figure out which values we do care about, because not choosing any is also a choice (and I think a particularly bad one). This CoC amendment is a step in that direction: I propose that we consciously adopt human diversity as one of our values. kind regards, Jonas [^1]: In non-natural lighting, green/pink is the other axis it controls. [^2]: And honestly? I get that. It has taken me years (and one really ugly incident) to realize this from the first time someone pointed this out to me. It is *hard* to step out of your own baked-in white balance.
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