Re: Announcing the elephant in the room BOF

Perhaps, at the next DebConf meeting, there should be set a BoF, with as much time as needed, with real-time video streaming and remote participation allowed, to discuss the process of choosing the hosting cities. If there are established rules about hosting eligibilities, they should also be discussed.

On Fri, 2 Aug 2019 at 5:29 PM Andrew McMillan <andrew@mcmillan.net.nz> wrote:

On Fri, 2019-08-02 at 20:23 +0300, Shachar Shemesh wrote:
>
> Why would people not feel free to talk had this been videoed?
>

Because some people are scared (terrified?) of representing positions
that disagree with their own government, or with governments that are
hostile to them and/or their worldview.

It might be easy for me, coming from a straight flush of old, straight,
middle-class, white male who grew up in a politically open environment,
but many people were not anything like so fortunate.

For some people they're not going to even open up with their true
opinions in public at all, and would need a fully private anonymous
forum to say what they *really* believe.

Obviously Israel is a mess, but we've had Debconf's in places with
problematic regimes in the past, although perhaps not one which is quite
so arrogant and/or flagrant about their human rights abuses.

The people running a DebConf likely have no political agenda in doing
so. They may well privately disagree with the human rights policies of
the state within which they live, but to be brutally honest I'd rather
see a DebConf in the country of Palestine than in Israel.

Cheers,
Andrew.

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