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Re: Debian, lists and discrimination



On 2004-08-08 05:27:15 +0100 Peter Samuelson <peter@p12n.org> wrote:

[MJ Ray]
Is any discussion involving women ever off-topic for -women,
actually?
Actually, yes.  The list topic is more specific than just "involving
women" or "touching on both women and Debian".  The focus of the list,
and the project, is to encourage women to get involved with Debian - in
any of the myriad ways one *can* get involved with Debian. [...]

Ignoring the desirability of "encourage women" as a focus, it sounds like the description "Discussion and collaboration involving women in Debian" is inaccurate or at least ambiguous. The following paragraph needs making less vague, maybe to reflect what you wrote, as you were very clear. http://lists.debian.org/debian-women/

Note that we also feel no need to be harsh with people who post
off-topic.  List traffic isn't nearly high enough to where enforcing
such rules would bring more benefit than harm. And really, you have to
admit, it's not like debian-devel enforces a topic either.

debian-devel and -user tend to be a bit "catch-all", so probably aren't a good comparison. Others like -doc and -www, do enforce topics more than -women has AFAICT.

[...]  By and large, we didn't accept your
premises and you didn't accept ours, so everybody was repeating
themselves.

It seemed I was asking questions and people were refusing to answer them, mostly answering with other questions and then saying that they "didn't understand" or "didn't see" my answer, as if that means my answer is invalid. We didn't really discuss premises explicitly AFAICR.

Is the channel log public? That should be stated in the FAQ/policy. I generally avoid public-log channels. I'm more likely to misphrase on IRC, especially when subtly trolled, and people seem to selectively quote from them more often. I think the higher misphrase rate is because IRC is not as expensive as email and more write-only.

It was long past time to free the channel up for more
productive uses.

It could have been productive. I was probably too optimistic.

--
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