It sometimes helps to be aware of the latter more subtle communication channels (except if one deliberately wants to troll and start a flamewar -- I'm not accusing you of doing this, BTW ;)
OK, but if I am writing my usual clear native English, there is little or nothing that I can do to avoid misinterpretation of my messages without second-guessing everyone's reactions. That's clearly not possible, so I ask for some of the claimed tolerance of the group. In any case, my attitude here is not really different to on other debian lists and it has rarely caused trouble there. The few cases that I am aware of it causing trouble with other debian lists, the people concerned actually TELL ME what the problem was, so it can be dealt with by one, other or both of us. Here, I just flames: heat and no light.
Given a lot of the subscribers to debian-women seem to think debian unfriendly, I have started to wonder whether there is really any problem with debian, or it's just intolerance of the multicultural reality that debian developers present. From a previous email on this topic:
[QUOTE]It would be inaccurate to say that this is a particular debian problem. In any large enough cross-cultural group, you probably have someone who offends you a bit. A strength of internet collaboration is the cross-cultural collaboration, but it's also a weakness. We can set up subculture groups to cope with this, like debian-uk, and we do. I don't think "women" is a culture, though. If you want to have a debian group with particular cultural norms, then do that. I think using "women" as a short description for it would be a horribly sexist move, don't you?
Trying to make the entire project a monoculture is unrealistic, so let's find ways to deal with it. Whether that means we have to permit sexism is an interesting question that I don't answer yet.
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