Difficult social problems are still difficult problems

http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/36858.html

by edward • 11 years ago

15 2 11 years ago

mjg59.dreamwidth.org

wpietri• 11 years ago

I totally agree with the point, "We need to accept that social problems are outside our realm of expertise and defer to the people who are experts."

I'm just writing a new job description, and I want to do my part to help rectify the tech industry's accidental exclusion of all sort of people. I did my best, but now I'm working hard to circulate it both to people in underrepresented groups and to experts in the hiring process.

It has been really helpful. I'm pretty well read on the topic, but I still got a lot of great substantive advice on how innocent-seeming things might put off people.

mukyu• 11 years ago

Murray claims that a clause about "reverse-isms" is a cornerstone of a CoC and yet three out of the four resources she mentions as being acceptable do not have one. The only one that does is a community explicitly designed to be a safe space[0] for marginalized groups with a shared ideology. That requirement is perfectly in line with their communities goals. That does not mean it is appropriate for all groups or even all groups that are trying to promote inclusiveness. The argument about "tone policing" and other supposed deficiencies is exactly the same.

The rest of Murray's article is not actually about the actual CoC or any flaws with it.

They did hastly accept the supposed "problems" (that is, it was not a 1:1 copy of the geekfeminism CoC) and tried to fix them. People then complained because they do not believe that things specifically designed for one specific community and are not recommended by most of the experts are appropriate for a general CoC to be used for myriad different communities with far different goals than one specific wiki. TODO then decides that maybe they should actually take some time to think about things instead of circling the wagon around their kneejerk changes.

Garrett then argues that they released something broken and should have consulted the experts and that was one page document is of the same complexity as a 1,000,000 loc kernel. Well, it wasn't broken and it is in line with what most experts suggest, or at least it has not been cogently argued that it was not.

[0] I am using their own definition: http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Safe_space

Difficult social problems are still difficult problems

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