On Fri, Mar 05, 2004 at 08:26:32AM -0600, Manoj Srivastava wrote: > On Thu, 4 Mar 2004 20:15:25 -0500, Branden Robinson <branden@debian.org> said: > > > Perhaps we need to reconsider our official recognition of Freenode's > > #debian as a Project resource. > > Fair enough. Do you think that hosting it on any other irc network is > likely to change matters, though? Not necessarily. [...] > Of course, we could wash our hands of the irc channels in the first > place, but having restarted visiting #debian, I can say that a lot of > people are being helped there as well. *If* we can't get the instant problem wrestled under control, then I think our next best course of action is to repudiate it. That is, if we actually feel it's a cesspool of misogynists that we're horrified to be associated with. On the other hand, some good seems to be coming out of this discussion, in that a fire has been lit under people to be more attentive to this particular problem. That's good, even if it is only ephemeral -- because by the time things would have backslid, we may have succeded in welcoming enough women to our ranks that our culture changes a little, and the problem is permanently solved. Or at least permanently attenuated. Recalling my earlier comments about gay-bashing, I seem to recollect that people have been called on it when they did it (or something that could be construed as it), both on our lists and IRC. We may have enough gay developers that we are self-policing in this respect, since many of us can think of fellow developers we work with who are guy. That puts a face on the target, and instead of a negative remark being about "them", it's actually about some of "us", and we rise to our own defense. In summary, now is a great time for those us with geek friends who happen to be women to recruit them to our ranks. It looks some much-needed consciousness-raising has taken place, so we should strike while the iron is hot. -- G. Branden Robinson | Psychology is really biology. Debian GNU/Linux | Biology is really chemistry. branden@debian.org | Chemistry is really physics. http://people.debian.org/~branden/ | Physics is really math.
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