[listmaster copied in hopes they will agree with my assessment here]
The pride month discussion has gone beyond what's appropriate for
debian-project at this point and has served its purpose.
It's possible that small sub threads may have some value, but overall,
I think that the discussion has moved into areas that are not
productive.
In particular, this morning's messages have basically verged into the
territory of people asking basic frequently asked questions about
diversity and inclusion, and various people stumbling through and trying
to produce answers to these questions.
If someone were asking poorly considered questions about packaging or
software development on debian-devel, we'd eventually decided that
debian-devel's job was not to educate someone in basic
packaging/software development.
Similarly, part of actually respecting the diversity statement in Debian
means that rather than spamming the list with basic questions, it's our
job as community members to go do some basic research and actually join
the discussion when we have an informed opinion.
The discussion of having an everyone matters month and collin's
responsive mail explaining basic facts about privilege and sexual
harassment were the last straws for me.
If you are going to participate in a diversity discussion beyond a
certain point you do need to actually spend some time with google just
as you would for any technical topic.
In this instance, researching arguments about privilege, criticism of
the all lives matter movement, explanations behind the black lives
matter movement (and why it is important to its members) would all be
valuable.
I'm not saying you need to agree with those things.
I'm saying that when you are joining a discussion that has been going on
for most of my lifetime, you need to do basic research. Just as if you
popped up and suddenly knew that the solution to all Debian's problems
was a rolling release, we'd expect you to go do some background reading.
There are some links from the antiharassment wiki page to various
resources, but I'll admit that the project doesn't have as good of a
collection of background reading about diversity and inclusion as we
should. I think trying to create that background info so we can stop
badly rehashing long-running discussions would be valuable.
And yes, we should (and I think do) have forums in Debian where people
who have honest questions and confusion about diversity can get answers.
debian-project is not that forum.
--Sam
