Hi Jonas

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].

You seem to interpret "neutral" to mean an objective and unbiased view (i.e. picture) of the world.

That's not what I mean when I use the word neutral here. Instead, I mean "not getting involved in".

The XSF is a technical standards organization, not an activist or political organization. So it should stay neutral by not getting involved in activism, political programmes and attempts at social engineering.
Seen in that light, the analogy regarding photography is largely irrelevant.

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.

There's nothing in our bylaws or in any XEP that says you need to support Nato or pay deference to it.

In any case, I would not be surprised if the Russian military was also using XMPP on the battlefield.

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.

I don't live in a Nato country and believe there's lots to criticize about it, but both those facts are irrelevant to the XSF's mission.

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.

I don't think we disagree that much with one another with regards to values. Diverse opinions are helpful and can result in better standards. I just don't think the XSF should be engaging in political activism and social engineering,

Regards

JC