Mostly agreeing with Wes, I will just add that as a past member of two out groups, (the Web community, Certificate Authorities) people have deliberately made it clear I am unwelcome on several occasions in the past.
On one occasion someone hissed when I gave my company name at the mic. Oh and when a working group chair was allowed to override the WG consensus on a proposed change to DNS SEC by referring it to a 'DNS Directorate' and folk wore 'black helicopter' hats to ridicule my protest at the abuse of a cabal, yeah that was pretty shity of y'all. And that little tantrum put back deployment of DNSSEC by at least six years.
Since I do crypto and other contentious stuff, at one time I did politics at the national level so I am quite used to that. But that doesn't mean I like it and most others are not willing to engage on those terms.
We have to be careful about bullying but we also have to be very careful about rules against bullying being weaponized to bully. In one standards group I was involved in multiple complaints against one particular individual led to the need for a conduct code. The minute it was agreed, that same individual used it to make a series of specious complaints.
This set of issues has particular valence in the US at the current time due to local political issues and the politics of the US tend to make waves throughout the English speaking world.
Rather than accept the fact that a certain set of language was used to intentionally denigrate people on account of ethnicity, gender, etc. one party has made even the acknowledgment that this occurred to be a partisan political issue. It has spent the last four years demanding that everyone take sides and now they are having an epic tantrum because along with the vast majority of polite, educated society, we chose the side opposing bigotry.
Why do people get so exercised by the IETF deciding to avoid the use of master/slave terminology but not cry 'censorship' when we are told we must use one particular dialect of SVG which is not supported by the current version of any tool whether commercial or open source (I had to modify Goatify). If freedom of speech is so important, why is nobody upset about the lack of hard core porn in Internet Drafts and RFCs?
I think the answers to these questions are rather obvious. We are a community and we live by a particular set of shared values and understandings. And ever since the murder of Heather Heyer, by those attempting to force the rest of us to suplicate to their symbols of bigotry, we have been called to show our rejection of such symbols.
I think the answers to these questions are rather obvious. We are a community and we live by a particular set of shared values and understandings. And ever since the murder of Heather Heyer, by those attempting to force the rest of us to suplicate to their symbols of bigotry, we have been called to show our rejection of such symbols.
