Exclusion, was: Clarification about krooger's platform

[MJ Ray <mjr@dsl.pipex.com>]

Jonathan Walther <krooger@debian.org> wrote:
> MJ Ray wrote:
> >Why should the sex imbalance be seen as any more urgent than race,
> >culture or any of the other tons of ways debian is demographically
> >different?
> Debian already has a debian-women mailing list for discussing such
> issues.  This indicates there is are real and widespread concerns among
> Debian members which have not been addressed yet.

To give one example, I'm pretty sure language-specific debian
user lists predate debian-women by some way, yet there is still
an ongoing struggle to keep support for some languages in the
debian project.

The debian-installer developers are working on probably the
single biggest improvement to debian access for years, making
it easier to install, but some languages that were in the old
installer are not in the new one and the list has been closed
for the next release with very little warning or announcement. I
think all the lost languages are simply because there were no d-i
developers who use that language in touch with their user group,
rather than any wrong-doing on d-i developers' part. After all,
it's time-consuming to communicate in someone else's language
and they're busy already.

So, there's far more obvious exclusion produced by lack of language
support than by using a "wrong" example gender in English. There
are probably other examples of demographic difference in debian,
yet krooger's platform only mentions the recent women campaign.
Do the women get extra attention because they write English?

Do DPL candidates have specific ideas on how to address other problems?
What ones are addressable by the DPL anyway?

[Margin note: cultural prejudice here suggests that language
barriers would increase the proportion of women, but that's
not at all the effect seen in debian, as far as I can tell.
Either this varies by geography or is masked by other effects.]

-- 
MJR/slef
My Opinion Only: see http://people.debian.org/~mjr/
Subscribed to this list. No need to Cc, thanks.