"Word origins are just that - origins. What matters is the current meaning, not where they originated. You can play that kind of game with lots of English words, many of which have absurd origin stories."
but it's not just a word origin. that was my point. the moral issues the satirical novel moralizes about are directly applicable to us and our implementation of "meritocracy". that's what makes it ironic! "What's relevant is now." but even if we look past that and just look at what the word means *now*, we still have an issue with the way it makes us look. organizations using the word "meritocracy" was a red flag for the sorts of people our organization sorely lacks all the way back in 2014 cf. https://readwrite.com/2014/01/24/github-meritocracy-rug/ and that public perception has only worsened since. the fact it's now showing up in FastCompany is what prompted me to start this thread "Crafting our message for the small number of horrible people seems less effective" I'm not saying we should do that. there are two issues here: (1) improving our external communication in a way that communicates our desire to build an inclusive, respectful, safe, and equitable organization (2) actually changing the way that we operate to better work towards those goals doing (2) is where we will continue to be met with resistance. with people who are upset, offended, or irritated by the work we're trying to do, the things we're saying, and the changes we're trying to make I'm not saying that everyone at Apache is a "pompous blow-hard". I'm saying that I, personally, have experienced enough here (from a vocal minority) to know that this won't be easy work "And these discussions in Apache-land are pretty consistently LESS hostile than in other communities I'm part of." that's true. I left Debian permanently for this reason. but it's still bad. and it's still enough that I have known multiple people who care about this stuff withdraw for their own emotional, psychological, and in some cases physical health Roman wrote: "Plus I'm still not sure what's being proposed as a replacement." well, I suggested one approach in one of my previous emails. but I actually don't think this is likely to be too much of an issue. I expect that it is perfectly possible to talk about how people's contributions ought to be recognized without mentioning "meritocracy" (as Rich hints wrt the blog post). lots and lots of other open source projects and organizations manage it perfectly well. we could start by looking at how they do it I would focus on trying to communicate two things: (1) we want to build an organization that recognizes individual contributions (with status, responsibility, and power) in a way that is inclusive of skillset, backgrounds, cultures, race, gender, sexuality, etc, etc (2) the technical details, i.e. how this happens. we already do this! our bylaws, project bylaws, etc. but we could improve it with practical tools/techniques/principals that can help us with inclusion, unconscious bias, and so on On Fri, 22 Mar 2019 at 15:45, Patricia Shanahan <p...@acm.org> wrote: > On 3/22/2019 6:56 AM, Shawn McKinney wrote: > > > >> On Mar 22, 2019, at 2:03 AM, Roman Shaposhnik <ro...@shaposhnik.org> > wrote: > >> > >> It would be very important to come up with a replacement that is > >> as effective as what we're trying to replace. Frankly, I don't know > >> a single candidate. > >> > >> Does anyone? > > > > Here are some, can’t say they carry the same level of clarity or weight. > > > > excellence, merit-based / merited, self-determination, deserving / > deservingness, worthiness / being worthy of, getting one's due, be entitled > / qualified to > > I suspect, without research data to back it up, that anything that > implies that those with decision making power got there primarily > through their own merit/deserts/worth etc. would have the same harmful > effects as a claim to be a meritocracy. I prefer the direction that > presents meritocracy as something towards which we can strive, but that > has not been achieved and may never be fully achieved. Luck and having > the right parents will go on being important. > > Patricia > > --- > This email has been checked for viruses by AVG. > https://www.avg.com > > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@community.apache.org > For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@community.apache.org > >
