this post was submitted on 27 Apr 2024
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Why ? Because I basically say "keep these personal informations for yourself since they are not needed while developing" ?
But they are saying that a board member should be elected based on the fact that he came from a minority, which is as wrong as asking that a code contribution should be accepted based on the minority status.
Agree on this. My point though is that the people in these positions need to be there for the merit and not for a status.
Nope. You can enforce a CoC if the ones delegated to enforce it are acknowledged as authoritative people and there is a clear path to do it. If you put a person in charge to enforce the code "just becasue [insert your favorite minority reason]" you end in the same place: the CoC will be selectively enforced only on a certain group of people.
Assuming you track them outside the project, yes you are right.
That is what you are saying now, not me.
I said that I don't care about what your identity is but only about the quality of your work, why did you assume that i mean that only the minorities should not disclose these informations ?
Else explain to me why it is relevant that the pull request just created is done by someone from a minority group.
Equal opportunity does not mean equal outcome. I lose something if a board member of the project I contribute is elected only because he is from a minority group because he replace a more knowledgeable member and the average quality of the work decline.
It is not that I don't care, it is that in certain situation it not pertinent if you are from a minority or not. Software development, particularly OSS where the entry point is really low, is one of this situation: why I should care about the group you are part of when you submit a contribute ? How it is pertinent. Do you want to have a voice in the project ? Earn it by contributing and being better of the ones you think are bad and or toxic. But wanting to have a say in the project "just because" is toxic too.
There are two tensions here:
Community building can be done without any coding, coding can be done without any community. However, to build a large project you need them both.
In a large volunteer project like this, not everything can be worked on. You become selective. We are going to major on this thing, or specifically talk about that project to get community engagement and get the thing done. This drives the project, she helps it to stop chasing hairs. Someone has to decide what feature is going in this release to make it ready to be a release candidate.
That group of people, ultimately making and influencing those decisions, is the CoC.
Let's take a for-instance: Sign up boxes.
For years, Linux sign up allows you to record random data into your profile, office, phone number, etc. These are text, and can be anything. Now, what if there's a rising need to add a minicom number(minix, used to be used by the deaf to send messages to an organisation, before email). As a hearing person, this is going to be a low priority for me, so I work on something else. I've got spare capacity, so if the project leaders are calling for help on this thing, I can go and help.
This, ultimately, builds a better over-all product, but it's not something I'd have noticed by myself, because I'm not part of the deaf community.
In our example with NixOS, asking for someone from the community to be a representative on it is not about code quality, but about the issue of visibility. Is there some need that that section of the community needs? Is there a way that the community can do y thing to make the os as a whole more accessible? I don't know the answer, because I'm not a member of that community, just as I'm not a member of the deaf community.
In this case, the merit, the qualification, for being on the CoC is being a member of a section of the community. It brings valuable a viewpoint, and adds a voice at the table that can make a real difference. Most coders know that having a wish list of features at the start can make it infinitely easier to add them, than having to go back an rewrite to make them happen. Having a voice that might need that feature makes a difference
The debate for CoC is about merit, but merit isn't just stubbornly focused on a single talent, it can also be about life experience.
We agree on that.
Nope.
CoC mean "Code of Conduct". It dictates how the interperpersonal relations should be in the community, not the direction the project need to follow. Which means that if you make a request I should not answer with "fuck your request" but with some more appropriate "we have not the manpower/motivation/infrastructure/whatever reason to do it, but feel free to do it yourself and submit it for review" answer (that's of course is a simple example, bear with me in this case) if I am not interested in your request or there are some real limitations.
True, but if you think that it is the CoC that produce this result, you are way wrong.
What produce this result is that people are willing to work on a feature even if they don't need it and if there is enough request for that feature. If you are the only one person who ask for a feature you will get low priority even if you are deaf (just to keep up with your example).
What do you think you can do if I don't want to work on your feature ? Use the CoC to compel me to do the work ? Do you think you can threaten me with a ban from the project ? Try it and you lose one developer (and probably others).
True, but it is simply the fact that the developers lowered the barrier to make a request on one side and on the other side someone made a good and motivated request.
The point is that this has nothing to do with the fact that a deaf person is in a leadership position.
Again, what you are asking for is to have a way to communicate with the developers and possibly a clear way that indicate how a request is handled.
But having a way for the community to communicate with the developers and the leadership of the project is not the same as having a CoC that mandate that the leadership must include members from minorities.
But in the end we are debating about nothing, the project was forked so I suppose that we just need to wait to see how it will end.