[Please Read] Backing up our values in Slack

[Carlos Tadeu Panato Jr]

Kubernetes Community,

TL;DR

• A new slack bot is being deployed that can respond when it detects certain words

• It responds with an ephemeral message that only the message author will see

• We plan to enable this for the word “guys”

As part of the efforts of being more inclusive, we implemented a few things that reflect our values:

1- A Slack Bot to help us write inclusive messages (new!)

2- A Slack reporter tool https://kubernetes.slack.com/archives/C9T0QMNG4/p1552580409184300

3- A pronoun field in your profile.

You can follow the progress of the work on https://github.com/kubernetes/community/issues/5660

At this stage it only has one word “guys” in the configuration, we might add other words and actions in the future. You may have seen this tool in the CNCF slack. 

How that works:

The bot will receive messages posted in public channels and if the message matches the filter it will act on that message.

In the current configuration, it will process messages that contain the word “guys” and will post an ephemeral message to the user who posted. That means only the person that posts the message will receive the notification with suggestions on how to use inclusive language and the author can edit their post.

We will enable the service in a week from now on 2021-04-15. If you have any questions or concerns, please ask in the #slack-admins channel or reply to this message before then.

Thank a moderator while you are there! We are always looking for contributors to our community slack infra (we run it in a Kubernetes cluster of course!), join our team! Much gratitude to our past and present community moderators! 

Lastly, thanks for reading this and being part of this amazing community. 

Carlos Panato

[Brian Topping]

The link to the slack channel does not work on my phone. I would like to read the discussion about the proposal before taking a position on this. 

It may be suboptimal, but “guys” is often used as a substitute for other awkward pronouns that have either a sexist or sexualized connotation. If the community enforces language norms, it should provide coaching to people who have good intent and may be very willing to change but are out of options. This is to say someone who uses a banished word should be educated, not just scolded with euphemisms such as “our values” and expect magical compliance. 

Brian

Sent from my iPhone

On Apr 8, 2021, at 01:55, Carlos Tadeu Panato Jr <cta...@gmail.com> wrote:



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[Carlos Tadeu Panato Jr]

Thanks for your message Brian

I tested the link on my mobile and that opens the message ok to me, not sure what went wrong.

I recommend you open a thread in slack (in the slack-admin channel) to continue the discussion there.

This is our first interaction with the service, we will improve that based on constructive feedback and add/update the words according. 

thanks!