Re: What does it mean to be inclusive
[Busy ? Read the two first lines of each paragraph and skip the rest.]
What is inclusion ?
For me, inclusion means taking care of letting everybody participate.
Aspects of this related with expressing ourselves in a more careful way
in order to avoid hurting others have been amply expressed already. I
fully agree and am grateful that participating to Debian opened my eyes
in many ways.
What I would like to tell today is that building a participative
consensus requires to give an opportunity to all to contribute to the
discussion. The contrary of this is to rely on spearhead groups to
prepare a set of well-thought alternatives and ask people to pick their
preference by themselves following their own sense of justice and
intellect. This is cleaving.
In a participative environment, the pace of consensus building is
adjusted to the speed of the community. After making a good suggestion
to your family, friends or colleagues, have you never refrained from
making another one, because you felt that somebody else would do it, and
everybody will be happier if the credit for making a good move is more
widely shared ?
In contrary, on the main Debian lists, there is little attention to this
aspect of inclusivity. Often, people who take care of family members,
who can contribute only on week-ends or only on business days, who were
sick that day or celebrating important moments of their life, etc., or
simply are not as comfortable as others in writing English, are left out
by spark threads where a couple of good points are made by a few core
people, and dilluted by a pile of casual conversations, arguments,
fights for having the last words, etc, rendering the whole topic closed,
and giving the feeling that nobody is going to listen to what is said by
people coming too late if they do not have a big name.
I already wrote it too much, but I want to reiterate my call to refrain
to post more than once a day in our main mailing lists.
Have a nice day!
Charles
--
Charles Plessy Nagahama, Yomitan, Okinawa, Japan
Debian Med packaging team http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-med
Tooting from work, https://mastodon.technology/@charles_plessy
Tooting from home, https://framapiaf.org/@charles_plessy
Reply to: