Re: What does it mean to be inclusive
[Busy ? Read the two first lines of each paragraph and skip the rest.] What is inclusion ? For me, inclusion means taking care of letting everybody participate. Aspects of this related with expressing ourselves in a more careful way in order to avoid hurting others have been amply expressed already. I fully agree and am grateful that participating to Debian opened my eyes in many ways. What I would like to tell today is that building a participative consensus requires to give an opportunity to all to contribute to the discussion. The contrary of this is to rely on spearhead groups to prepare a set of well-thought alternatives and ask people to pick their preference by themselves following their own sense of justice and intellect. This is cleaving. In a participative environment, the pace of consensus building is adjusted to the speed of the community. After making a good suggestion to your family, friends or colleagues, have you never refrained from making another one, because you felt that somebody else would do it, and everybody will be happier if the credit for making a good move is more widely shared ? In contrary, on the main Debian lists, there is little attention to this aspect of inclusivity. Often, people who take care of family members, who can contribute only on week-ends or only on business days, who were sick that day or celebrating important moments of their life, etc., or simply are not as comfortable as others in writing English, are left out by spark threads where a couple of good points are made by a few core people, and dilluted by a pile of casual conversations, arguments, fights for having the last words, etc, rendering the whole topic closed, and giving the feeling that nobody is going to listen to what is said by people coming too late if they do not have a big name. I already wrote it too much, but I want to reiterate my call to refrain to post more than once a day in our main mailing lists. Have a nice day! Charles -- Charles Plessy Nagahama, Yomitan, Okinawa, Japan Debian Med packaging team http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-med Tooting from work, https://mastodon.technology/@charles_plessy Tooting from home, https://framapiaf.org/@charles_plessy
Re: History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes
2022, ഫെബ്രുവരി 22 11:39:48 PM IST, Andrey Rahmatullin ൽ എഴുതി >On Tue, Feb 22, 2022 at 12:29:53PM -0500, Paul Tagliamonte wrote: >> Allow me, if you will, to talk a bit about something that's been on my mind >> a bit over the last handful of years in Debian. >I've heard a "we will discuss it and let you know in 5 years" joke about >Debian before I've even started using or contributing to Debian, 10+ years >ago. >I don't know if this was ever different. >The argument I've heard several times goes "yes, we discussed this and >nothing came out of that discussion because nobody did the work, what did >you expect?" or "we have a lot of ideas but not a lot of people willing to >implement them". > There are also many cases where people are there to do the work, but some people holding authority simply block any change or just don't officially respond, even if specifically asked. Something we have been doing for many years is reason enough to keep doing the same. -- Sent from my Android device with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.
Re: History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes
> "Paul" == Paul Tagliamonte writes: Paul> Hello, Debianites, Allow me, if you will, to talk a bit about Paul> something that's been on my mind a bit over the last handful Paul> of years in Debian. It's something that's pretty widely Paul> circulated in particular circles, but I don't think I've seen Paul> it on a Debian list before, so here's some words that I've Paul> decided to put together. Paul, thanks for bringing this up. I think we should employ caution in approaching something like this, and I appreciate your dedication to Debian by encouraging us to carefully approach the situation and not to focus too much on any specific discussion. Paul> During World War II, the OSS (Office of Strategic Services)[1] Paul> distributed a manual[2] (the Simple Sabotage Field Manual), Paul> which was used to train "citizen-saboteur" resistance Paul> fighters, some of whom were told, not to pick up arms, but to Paul> confound the bureaucracy by tying it up with an unmanageable Paul> tangle of "innocent" behavior. This is really interesting. I don't have time to explore how this relates to my personal experience now, and perhaps this is not quite far enough in the process to do that. Do you think that we, here have the adequate authority to explore this? Perhaps we should organize a committee of those interested--perhaps even augmented by a few who still have some concerns-- to make recommendations to the DPL on a group of individuals who could adequately study these issue? I want to make sure we pursue this at the right level and with all appropriate deliberation. I'm sorry, I just couldn't resist. I am also considering your message in a more serious manner, but I don't have any quick thoughts there. --Sam
Re: History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes
On Tue, Feb 22, 2022 at 12:29:53PM -0500, Paul Tagliamonte wrote: > Allow me, if you will, to talk a bit about something that's been on my mind > a bit over the last handful of years in Debian. I've heard a "we will discuss it and let you know in 5 years" joke about Debian before I've even started using or contributing to Debian, 10+ years ago. I don't know if this was ever different. The argument I've heard several times goes "yes, we discussed this and nothing came out of that discussion because nobody did the work, what did you expect?" or "we have a lot of ideas but not a lot of people willing to implement them". -- WBR, wRAR signature.asc Description: PGP signature
History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes
Hello, Debianites, Allow me, if you will, to talk a bit about something that's been on my mind a bit over the last handful of years in Debian. It's something that's pretty widely circulated in particular circles, but I don't think I've seen it on a Debian list before, so here's some words that I've decided to put together. I've intentionally not drawn lines to the 'discussions' going on (or the 'discussions' in the past I could point to) to avoid getting dragged into more thrash, so if you reply, please do try to keep this clear of any specific argument that you feel this may or may not apply to. This is a more general note that I think could use some thought from anyone who's interested. During World War II, the OSS (Office of Strategic Services)[1] distributed a manual[2] (the Simple Sabotage Field Manual), which was used to train "citizen-saboteur" resistance fighters, some of whom were told, not to pick up arms, but to confound the bureaucracy by tying it up with an unmanageable tangle of "innocent" behavior. While no one is working within the Debian community member attempting to subvert us sent from the shady conglomerate of nonfree operating systems by following this playbook, this playbook is an outstanding illustration of how some innocent behavior can destroy the effectiveness of an organization. It's effective, precisely *because* it's not overly malicious, and these behaviors -- while harmful -- are explainable or innocent. Section (3) covers this in detail. Most of the OSS Simple Sabotage Field Manual covers things like breaking equipment or destroying tanks, but section (11) is "General Interference with Organizations and Production". I'm just going to focus here. Let's take a look at section (11): > (1) Insist on doing everything through "channels." Never permit short-cuts > to be taken in order to expedite decisions. > > (2) Make "speeches." Talk as frequently as possible and at great length. > Illustrate your "points" by long anecdotes and accounts of personal > experiences. Never hesitate to make a few appropriate "patriotic" > comments. > > (3) When possible, refer all matters to committees for "further study and > consideration." Attempt to make committees as large as possible -- never > less than five. > > (4) Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible. > > (5) Haggle over precise wordings of communications, minutes, resolutions. > > (6) Refer back to matters decided upon at the last meeting and attempt to > re-open the advisability of that decision. > > (7) Advocate "caution." Be "reasonable" and urge your fellow co-conferees to > be "reasonable" and avoid haste which might result in embarrassments or > difficulties later on. > > (8) Be worried about the propriety of any decision - raise the question of > whether such action as is contemplated lies within the jurisdiction of > the group or whether it might conflict with the policy of some higher > echelon. I won't go through each of these point-by-point since everyone reading this is likely sharp enough to see how this relates to Debian (although I will point out I find it particularly interesting to replace "patrotic" here with the Debian-specific-patriotism -- Debianism? -- and re-read some of the more heated threads) I have a theory of large organizations I've been thinking a lot about that came from conversations with a colleague, which is to think about an organization's "metabolic overhead" -- i.e., the amount of energy that an organization devotes to intra-organization communication. If you think about a car manufacturing plant, the "metabolic overhead" is all the time spent on things like paperwork, communication, planning. It's not possible (or desirable!) for an organization to have 0% overhead, nor is it desirable (although this one *is* possible) to spend 100% time on overhead. I think it *may* be possible to get to above 100% overhead, if workplace contention spills out into drinks after work. All of the points in the OSS Simple Sabotage Manual are things designed to increase the metabolic overhead of an organization, and to force organization members to spend time *not* doing their core function (like making cars, running trash pickup or ensuring the city has electricity), but rather, spend their time litigating amongst themselves as the core function begins to become harder and harder to maintain. This has the effect of degrading the output/core function of an organization, without any specific cause (like a power loss, etc). I'd ask those who are reading this to consider how this relates to their time spent in Debian. Is what you find something you're happy about with a hobby project you're choosing to spend your free time on? Are you taking actions to be a good participant? To do a bit of grandstanding myself, do remember that it's not just your time here -- when we spend significant resources litigating and playing bureaucracy games, we spend
Re: What does it mean to be inclusive
For me, inclusion means working with everyone to make Debian as useful an operating system as possible for as many people as possible. I love that Debian is one of the *only* Linux distributions that has a good accessibility wiki, plays the beep to allow me, a blind person, to press s then enter to start the installer with speech. I also love that Mate, pretty much the only really accessible desktop environment out there, is selectable in the installer. I do wish accessibility was more of a priority for more package maintainers, like Thunderbird, which is really slow to use with Orca when there are lots of emails in a folder, or Steam, KDE, Gnome, stuff like that. But that's not really up to Debian. Devin Prater r.d.t.pra...@gmail.com On Mon, Feb 21, 2022 at 3:12 PM Gerardo Ballabio wrote: > Sam Hartman wrote: > > I agree that Debian has committed to being open and inclusive. However, > for me that means something different than you say in your second > sentence. To me that means we've committed to being open to as large a > cross section of people--as diverse a cross section of people as possible. > > > The difference in how we interpret things is whether we're focused on > the individual or the aggregate affect. > > It seems indeed that we may have a different concept of inclusion. For > me, you aren't really being inclusive if you aren't welcoming all > people, not just those who increase a cross section. And you aren't > really welcoming a group if you aren't welcoming every individual > member of that group. > > That doesn't mean that Debian should be forced to keep people who > misbehave (don't respect the CoC) or don't align with its core mission > (don't respect the Social Contract). As I see it, that is a completely > different issue. > > But this is deviating from the point that I was trying to make, that > is, that Debian can't use the "we are a private group" argument as a > waiver from the (moral, if not legal) obligation to treat people > fairly (and I read your original message as acknowledging the need for > fair treatment, so I thought we were on the same side). So forgive me > if I don't want to go further on this subthread. > > Gerardo > >
Re: What does it mean to be inclusive
Felix Lechner writes: > Hi, > > On Mon, Feb 21, 2022 at 7:28 AM Sam Hartman wrote: >> >> In my model, the bar for excluding an individual, particularly at the >> beginning is very low. >> >> * We expect people to agree to the social contract. >> That's a big exclusion; a lot of people don't care about those >> principles. >> >> * We require people to agree to the CoC; that's another big bar. >> >> * At various levels of involvement we work to confirm people are >> willing to follow these things to various degrees. >> >> In effect, we have a bunch of exclusions for making the community more >> welcoming, because over all in aggregate doing that creates a more >> inclusive community. > > A community with a low bar for expulsion is not inclusive. It is selective. AFAIK we average about an expulsion a decade, so how much higher a bar do you want to set for expulsions? BTW I would interpret this mail of yours as pointlessly argumentative, which strikes me as a continuation of the pattern that others have pointed out. Please give it a rest now. Cheers, Phil. -- |)| Philip Hands [+44 (0)20 8530 9560] HANDS.COM Ltd. |-| http://www.hands.com/http://ftp.uk.debian.org/ |(| Hugo-Klemm-Strasse 34, 21075 Hamburg,GERMANY signature.asc Description: PGP signature
