Re: Diversity statement for the Debian Project
gregor herrmann <gregoa@debian.org> writes:
> On Fri, 23 Mar 2012 20:38:39 +0100, Enrico Zini wrote:
>> I can think of another thing that we care about, which I don't see
>> mentioned here: "We expect people to be constructive members of the
>> community."
> Agreed.
> And I think we are also not open to people who don't share these
> values, e.g. people with a racist, sexist, ... behaviour.
While I certainly agree, I think it's best to leave the latter implicit in
the statement of what we *do* accept, since otherwise one can easily get
caught up in one of the more annoying derailing arguments ("you're
intolerant of my intolerance!"). After all, if we have a project
diversity statement, the obvious implication is that the members of the
project should pay attention to it as a guide for how to interact with
people. And we want to avoid having the diversity statement drift into a
code of conduct, as that involves a whole different set of arguments (that
I think are mostly beside the point of a diversity statement).
For those who haven't seen it, this is my all-time favorite diversity
statement, although it's not completely applicable to Debian:
http://www.dreamwidth.org/legal/diversity
The Ubuntu one isn't at all bad, and I think it's a good model to follow,
but I find the Dreamwidth statement actively inspiring and emotionally
moving, which is pretty rare for things that get buried in the "legal"
section of a web site. (Which may be a bit too much to aspire to when
we're a large and diverse project; Dreamwidth has the advantage that their
diversity statement only had to be signed by two people when they first
wrote it.)
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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