Hi RO,
Thanks - there’s a lot in here. I am grateful you surface these
concerns, I am sure many share them.I've tried to summarise your points
- if you feel I’m mis-representing them, please call me out.
1. You’re concerned that this change is a sop to the politically
militant, and that this is a slippery slope.
2. The proposal itself is cosmetic and does little or nothing to advance
diversity which you believe is not a problem in open source, at least
not relative to proprietary software development.
3. Focusing energy here is a distraction (or worse) to Mozilla as an
open source project.
On point 1, my perception is that you don’t disagree with the proposal
itself, but your concern is about the context it’s made in. My concern
is that “meritocracy” carries ambiguity and baggage, and that ambiguity
seems to extend even beyond the field of open source governance at this
point. Better, in my view, to be very clear about what we intend -hence
the wording of the proposal. My sincere hope is that people who believe
wholeheartedly in “meritocracy”, and conversely people who think it’s
become a harmful concept, would all agree with the proposed statement of
how authority should be distributed in the project. I invite you now,
and in future, to scrutinise the proposed wording to determine if you
feel a line is in danger of being crossed. i.e. does the wording conform
to what you consider good about “meritocracy”? Does it represent a good
system?
At the same time, I can easily understand many feel a strong affiliation
with the term itself. For 20 years, it has represented for many a new,
better way of collaborating and it’s possible to feel a great attachment
to it. I don’t have a good answer for that, and nor is there a neater,
tidier conception to offer.
On point 2, you say that the proposal is “window dressing”. Sure -
let’s call it that. But window dressing exists for a reason, doesn’t it?
It has a signaling function and serves to invite people in. That is
entirely the idea here: that “meritocracy” has become associated for
some with a less welcoming or open community. Let’s change that signal.
Thank you for pointing out that there are reasonable efforts underway to
boost diversity and accessibility. I hold these to be important in
debiasing this system. I don’t agree that open source projects are more
diverse than proprietary software development: it would appear that the
systems that exist in open source somehow exacerbate the problem of
diversity. Considering diversity in gender representation, data shows
open source lagging the rest of the industry. FLOSS 2013 [0] is
obviously rather old now, but more recent data [1] (what is now the
CHAOSS D&I working group of which Mozilla is a part [2]) appears to
confirm this too. I share your instinct that open source should be more
diverse, and yet, it does not seem to be.
On point 3, I’m not asserting the priority of this over other issues and
there may more important and/or more urgent issues to raise. If you wish
to make the case for them, please do so, but they remain other issues,
and we can certainly discuss more than one thing at once here. I take
this point as more of a meta-comment on governance, rather than anything
specific to this proposal. Reasonable?
Best regards,
Patrick
0.
https://floss2013.larjona.net/results.en.html
1.
https://osleadershipsummit2017.sched.com/event/9Khn/diversity-in-open-source-projects-susan-wu-midokura-daniel-izquierdo-bitergia-nicole-rutherford-intel
2.
https://github.com/chaoss/wg-diversity-inclusion
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