Re: Debian-women support?
On Sat, 2004-07-24 at 11:23, nicole wrote:
> Perhaps this response from our "friend" Jonathan can be used as an example
> of WHY debian-women exists.
<snip>
> I am not sure why he was solicited for a response on a "supporters" page
> considering his fairly well-known point of view. Perhaps he received the
> invitation by mistake.
This event does bother me a little. I have to agree with JW that it
shouldn't be an exclusive club. If everytime we get trolled we kick a
person out with a lot of abuse and flames, then we are not actually
progressing. Feeding the trolls makes them larger, but changing our
course to the tune of their laughter is very sad. The man said some
stupid things, but also had the point that he would support a woman as
much as he would support a man (in the initial questions). I had to deal
with a lot of crap on our mailing lists when I first got president of
linux australia, not so much because I'm female, but because there was a
lot of mistrust in the community about the group due to its past, and we
had to build that up. We didn't ban anyone from having their say,
certainly didn't kick people off lists, and now we have quite a civil
and supportive mailing list. I guess I'm trying to say we'll come up
across this time and time again until we earn some trust (and yes debian
women has to earn trust, just like every other group), and we need a
more constructive way of dealing with it without segmenting ourselves.
Eventually silly comments like JWs simply won't be funny or
troll-worthy, because they will be completely displaced. We should just
get out there are be making a positive contribution to the project and
community, and the actions will speak for themselves.
You can't simply _tell_ someone to change their tune, you can however
prove through action their tune is so irrelevant that it isn't worth
singing. People like this only want a rise from us, and we give it to
them.
Cheers,
Pia
--
Pia Smith <pia@linux.org.au>
Linux Australia
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