27 Apr
2024
27 Apr
'24
2:36 a.m.
Hello JC,
On Samstag, 27. April 2024 09:33:42 CEST JC Brand wrote:
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.]
On 2024/04/26 15:35, Jonas Schäfer wrote:
"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.
On Freitag, 26. April 2024 13:01:12 CEST JC Brand
wrote:
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. 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. 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"? 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.