On Fri, 2010-06-18 at 10:36 -0500, inode0 wrote: > Seriously those days were not very long ago, I'm not talking about the > dark ages. Okay sorry for the confusion, I didn't know about the discussion you referenced or how long ago it happened. I made a compare-contrast between now and a long while back when our planet used to not be open and (I thought) of a less controversial nature with a higher quality of content. > Agreed, being considerate of others it nice. Some will do that and > some won't. It isn't a requirement, feel free to encourage it. Yeah, I don't think we can make and enforce rules that people need to be considerate of each other. E.g., it's not a law in the US that you must be considerate of others and you won't get arrested for not being considerate. Such a thing would be ridiculous. But *culturally* I don't think considerateness should really be an option. I would really like to see our project with a strong culture where a lack of considerateness is strongly discouraged. How do we build that kind of culture? Here's one idea I have, feel free to dart it up / use it to build a better idea: - Have some basic guidelines about what's appropriate to post to planet and what's not appropriate to post to planet written up and linked to from the planet sidebar and/or footer. - Set up a private mailing list / ticket system / something where people can submit complaints about posts on planet. - If the post does seem to violate the guidelines, someone (I don't know who) contacts the poster directly letting them know about the guidelines and letting them know which guideline they violated and that their post had upset some people, asking them to consider filtering it from the planet. Limiting contact with the poster to one person (hopefully one less emotionally involved) rather than a deluge of complaints I think comes off as more friendly, and I think discussing the post in a friendly manner one-on-one is less confrontational. Overhead of a ticket system / someone to answer the tickets is an issue though. If you don't talk to the person how do you build the culture? I can see how you'd read this as policy=>enforcement, but I don't think the point is to hunt people down and punish them. I think the point is to build a better culture, and you can't do that by just plugging your ears and covering your eyes to things that aren't compatible with the culture you're trying to build. > The line was pretty clearly drawn in my mind. Planet contributors can > pretty much talk about anything they please (given a few constraints). What are those constraints? > > > But how about sexualized photos of scantily-clad women? I'm not cool > > with that. Maybe some people are, but I don't want to have to stop > > reading planet Fedora because I'm afraid of what might come up. If I'm > > browsing planet Fedora during the workday and a big picture of Lucy Liu > > in a wet white bikini is on my screen, according to my office's sexual > > harassment policies, I'd be in trouble! To folks who don't work for Red > > Hat, such an incident might be reason for their work in Fedora to no > > longer be sanctioned by their employer. > > If said scantily-clad women are seen every day on television, on > billboards, and in magazines I think we are overreacting. No one has > to read the planet while at work if it is a problem to do so. I don't > agree with that prohibition either to be honest given the previous > discussion I had on this list about the planet. (I hope I'm not coming off too touchy on this subject b/c I'm female, and it probably goes without saying but I wanted to make it clear I'm totally not offended if you still disagree with me on the above point.) I would argue though just because they are seen every day on television, billboards, and in magazines doesn't mean they aren't a problem there as well. There are plenty of teenage girls killing themselves via anorexia or bulemia... I've heard of little girls ~8 years old telling people they are "on a diet." Also images like that aren't equally tolerated in every country / area. I know of a handful of popular magazines in particular that re-jigger their layouts and photo choices for publication in particular countries. That aside, I feel really strongly that if Planet has content that isn't work safe, something is wrong. There's a reason there are particular things that aren't considered appropriate at work - because the focus at work is supposed to be on work! Particular images are considered sexual harassment, because they support a culture where women are second-class citizens, and they incite negative emotional reactions in people making them less able to get their job done. So I would argue for planet content guidelines encouraging posts of a nature that would be appropriate to discuss with work colleagues - cute puppies, family ski trip, new cool phone - kosher. Your night out at the strip club or your allegiance to your company's competitor's products - probably not so smart to bring up at work. > > To me it seems there are clearly classes of posts that aren't > > acceptable. > > Sure. But an Ubuntu logo and while I can't read this particular post > it seems to be about the Ubuntu manual project and if that is what it > is about I find it hard to condemn it without knowing a lot more than > I currently know. Right now it seems quite harmless to me. I have a really hi-res screen and that logo is still obnoxiously big. Maybe it wouldn't have bothered me as much if it was a reasonable size... > > First of all, did you take a look at the link he provided? To me, it > > appears to be a commercial page looking to grab a lot of detailed > > personal information about people before offering anything of use. > > No, I don't click on random links from blogs written in languages I can't read. Well, the link did look less-than-innocent to me. > > Secondly, are you criticizing me for bringing this up at all? How have I > > been not excellent in bringing up the issue here? Should I have kept my > > mouth shut? Is what I've written in protest really offensive or hurtful > > to the poster in question? > > I hope you know by now that I *know* you are one of the most excellent > people I know. Of course and I believe the same about you :) > > I do, however, think that all the high level emphasis and talk about > hall monitoring, toxic and poisonous people, etc. is not only not > helping to solve any problem but is creating a harmful atmosphere of > control and intolerance that is not what the Fedora Project needs. I think maybe though, you're putting a particular negative spin on it that isn't quite fair. E.g., if you look at the other side, if we don't do anything and just 'let it all hang out' - it seems like individuals don't always have the correct judgment in what to post, which leads to posts that contribute to a negative atmosphere around the project or even open source in general. Silence tends to be interpreted as an endorsement. For example, there is a very real misogynistic atmosphere around open source projects in general: http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Category:Incidents I'm really sad that Planet Fedora is cited there (although it's far from the worst incident on there, see http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/CouchDB_talk) This kind of stuff goes on then we wonder why there aren't more women involved in open source.... I think why we keep hemming and hawing about the issue here is because freedom is such an important value to our community, and anything appearing to be censorship evokes a visceral negative reaction. But please, let's also consider those whose freedom is being impinged on when we let people post whatever they want without any guidelines or consequences. For example, we have freedom of speech in the US, but we also have defamation laws.... ~m _______________________________________________ advisory-board mailing list advisory-board@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/advisory-board
