Hi Ekaitz,
On 10/27/24 11:47, Ekaitz Zarraga wrote:
Hi,
On 2024-10-27 11:00, indieterminacy wrote:
> I think a useful measurement of any community is the diversity
within it.
I do think we are a pretty diverse group.
But it all comes to what you consider diverse. Some people brought
this conversation during the Guix Days, probably ignoring the fact
that we had people coming from all over the world. I don't know what
was their definition of diversity at that moment.
I can't talk for the people you mention, but usually by diversity one
means social diversity, it meansco-existence of different social groups
within a given setting.
On the other hand, we have something in common, so it's really hard to
be diverse in the broad sense. Should we include people that like
proprietary software, too? Those are also people, and I'm sure they
would feel uncomfortable between us.
For sure they would, but "proprietary software user" is not a social
group, so they would not be meaningful in a measure of the Guix project
social diversity.
This is not to say we shouldn't try to make things better and more
welcoming, of course we should. But I don't think "diversity" actually
means that much as a measure because I don't think it's an absolute
concept and I think it's very easy to misunderstand.
I am not an expert but there are many social scientist that are, for
sure for them social diversity is a pretty clear concept since they
sometimes have to measure it for their research work.
While for sure all your points about care, overwork and burnout are
valid, I believe the fundamental problem to be of governance. To make
Guix better software (there is scientific consensus that diverse
communities have better governance, it is easy to find), we should find
out more about how to measure social diversity and take concrete actions
towards making the Guix community a more diverse one.
At last, image is fundamental otherwise big corporations wouldn't spend
so much to try to do whatever-washing, getting distance between us and
GNU/FSF would concretely help very much with diversity.
Thank you all in the Guix community for your awesome work so far,
giacomo
