Roberto C. Sánchez <robe...@debian.org> writes: > I think that perhaps the source of Scott's concern (and to an extent my > own) is that it is not necessarily obvious where the boundary is when it > comes to Debian. The uncertainty here is the problem. I deal with it > by trying to remain well away from the boundary. However, I can see how > some who view Debian as a forum for social interaction in addition to > technical interaction are rightly concerned.
I completely agree that it's uncertain. I don't think this is only in Debian; I think it's uncertain in society as a whole right now. We're going through a particularly tumultuous period in politics in many of the countries from which Debian contributors come, and there's a ton of heated political statements and hard feelings and fear-based attempts to rally various political forces, and it's all very uncomfortable and upsetting. None of us can avoid being affected by that discomfort and upsetness. Standards are indeed shifting. This happens all the time in human society, and it's part of the discomfort of getting older. I have had older relatives who used various racial slurs without even thinking about it, which would be totally unacceptable today. I suspect that towards the end of their lives they were pretty irritated about having to change the way that they always talked in order to avoid facing social consequences. The uncertainty is real, and it's upsetting, and I think we should all be conscious of that. But, well, I'm pretty dubious that we're going to be able to completely remove the uncertainty, because human society is complicated and there's some baseline level of uncertainty. This is *particularly* true in an international project where we're coming from far, far different social backgrounds and dealing with different local issues. Part of the difficulty, but also the joy, of being part of a project like this is that we all get a crash course in cultural sensitivity and become much better at understanding the perspectives of people from far different cultures, and finding ways to work with them (sometimes haltingly). It's a very valuable life skill, and it can be really exciting when one pulls it off successfully, but it's real work! It's hard! It's worth admitting to ourselves that it's hard. And some of us are reaching farther and doing more work than others. For example, I'm from the United States, which for better or worse has a tendency to get its culture and politics all over everyone else to an extent that a lot of people are vaguely aware of US cultural conventions because they're ubiquitous. To take an obvious example already raised, we're having this whole discussion in my native language. That's a huge, huge advantage for me! And, to take another example, the only reason why I'm not utterly oblivious about, say, political tensions between Greece and Turkey is because I happen to have some friends who pulled me aside and educated me before I made a fool of myself. Because I have the privilege of assuming that people will follow my cultural conventions most of the time, I don't *have* to learn things like that to be successful. That doesn't make me a bad person (or a good person); it just makes me lucky in that particular way. I personally believe pretty strongly that, as a matter of fairness, we should distribute the work more evenly. Therefore, I try to go learn things that I don't really *need* to learn, so that I can try to meet people closer to halfway. I've been lucky enough in life that it's never going to be halfway, but I can at least get a bit closer. That's where I'm coming from in this. The uncertainty is real, and I get why people find it upsetting. I totally understand why it feels like a strain, and not particularly fun when people just want to write code. But I also think it's the price of being an international community, and *someone* is going to have to pay that price, and to the extent that people like me don't do our part of the heavy lifting, that price falls on other people very disproportionately, and to me that's unfair. We should be gracious with each other, and understand that we're not all international diplomats, and that we're going to make mistakes and barge into each other's political conflicts and be that person who says something horribly offensive. And we apologize and forgive and move on as best we can and keep this whole amazing project going. But it *is* work, and yes, we're asking everyone to do work, and yes, that's a real burden. I don't think that's really avoidable; it's just a question of how we distribute the work. My general philosophy on this is that insofar as I have the energy, I should step up and do my part of the work. And when I don't have the energy, I don't have to do the work, but maybe I should also consider staying a bit more quiet. I don't have to; I can just speak my mind anyway, but when I do, there's a higher than normal chance I might need to apologize afterwards. And that's okay! It's okay to decide you're not going to try to be diplomatic and are going to risk it, and sometimes that's okay, and sometimes you're going to have to say later "whoops, that wasn't wise, I'm sorry." As long as the apology is there, and is sincere, I think it will all work out in the end. There's a lot of good will in this project; people are not particularly eager to believe the worst of other people. But if one starts taking the position of never apologizing for anything because demanding apologies is unfair and it's not their responsibility to assuage easily-offended people.... whooboy. That's not going to go anywhere good. -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
