Re: Social Committee proposal
On Fri, 26 Jan 2007 01:07:30 +0200, Lars Wirzenius <liw@liw.iki.fi> said:
> On to, 2007-01-25 at 16:27 -0600, Manoj Srivastava wrote:
>> Why don't I think it is a good idea? Well, because, unlike
>> technical issues, social issues are very subjective. Also, social
>> and cultural norms differ widely from culture to culture; which
>> culture shall be represented in, and whose norms shall be enforced
>> by this social/cultural committee?
> That's easy: we should enforce (assuming that is not too strong a
> word) the social and cultural norms that we, as a community, agree
> on. The comparison to technical policy is not entirely invalid: we
> make up our technical policy ourselves, too.
But the technical issues are often not subjective; while
social issues almost always are subjective, and very very heavily
influenced by cultural bias.
> We can determine social policy by discussion and, if necessary, by
> voting. I'd rather see consensus, and, more specifically, see the
> soc-ctte spell out the social norms and if the developer body
> disagrees with it, and can't convince the soc-ctte via discussion,
> they can force a change via a GR.
Voting implies the tyranny of the majority; and I would expect
the social and cultural norms to be heavily biased towards white,
male, occidental euro-american social and cultural modes; since such
is the composition of the voting population.
I am not sure I want to be governed by such a social /cultural
policy.
manoj
--
Programmers do it bit by bit.
Manoj Srivastava <srivasta@debian.org> <http://www.debian.org/~srivasta/>
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