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Re: Diversity statement for the Debian Project



On Sun, Mar 25, 2012 at 01:31:07PM +0100, Andrew M.A. Cater wrote:
 
> It happens that we've got LGBT, many racial backgrounds, both biological sexes, all gender identities,
> people from many language backgrounds, people with disabilities, people of all religious beliefs 
> and people who have none (should I need a pastor who is also a sysadmin, I know exactly
> who to turn to, for example), people who live in all environments up to and including the ultra 
> self-sufficient types living remotely and off-grid.
> 
> About the only political stance we've taken was a very long time ago: posts from a Finnish neo-Nazi
> were removed as a) culturally inappropriate, b) essentially entirely irrelevant to Debian and 
> c) inappropriate for certain European and other countries where Nazi propaganda is illegal.

some people might see a short statement like 'we dont discriminate and accept
all people' as 'better'.  the idea that you dont enumerate any group and use a
general term for 'all catagroies' sounds like you have won something by not
leaving anyone out.  But the nature of the statement is not suppose to be
'perfect' because its the enemy of the good. The general trend in technical
fields is that white, middle-class, college-educated, American/European,
English-speaking, cis-gendered, hetero males are going to apply 99% of the time
and dont need to be reminded of these facts. So a statement should explicitly
list a good mix of what we are not getting, and by 'good mix' I dont mean
exhaustive. Because if you have a half-way decent one, it will lend itself to the
idea that you are just darn happy to include other less-well-included folks.
In fact, I like the statement the way Andrew wrote it because it is an
informal, friendly and somewhat humorous approach to sounding inclusive.
It doesn't sound like your talking to an HR person who is reading something
prepared by a lawyer, it sounds like a cool human wrote it for other cool
humans. And the idea that our statement can be edited and extended (by a patch
:)) is something that most democracies dont allow, so why not add something if
people want it, its not like you print these things out. And I dont think its
bad to make a version that's not pefect the first time or dont write one. We
modify all kinds of documents all the time.

But I'm sure I'm in the minority for thinking that :)

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