On 2011-05-10 Per wrote:
Greg KH wrote:
It is NOT "political correctness" at all.
It is the act of causing others to feel intimidated and degraded. That is what we need to work to remove and not allow.
How is that "politically correct"?
If you try to parse this out individually, sure,
you can get stuck in the minor details of wordsmithing.
NO! It's not minor details of wordsmithing! You seem to assume that cultural differences don't exist as otherwise you wouldn't talk in that way.
I'm not saying that there aren't cultural differences at all. I know that very well.
What I am trying to do here is help create an environment where all are welcome and do not feel uncomfortable.
I am assuming we already have such an environment, and that we therefore do not need any further guidelines. I agree with Philipp, if we take this any further, in the extreme we'll end up with political correctness:
"Political correctness is a term which denotes language, ideas, policies, and behavior seen as seeking to minimize social and institutional offense in occupational, gender, racial, cultural, sexual orientation, religious belief, disability, and age-related contexts". (from wikipedia).
The goal of this is to write down our implicit policy. It doesn't aim to change the status quo, just bring awareness of the issues. And it's not even meant to bring awareness of these issues to 99% of you but to people who might be uncertain or are worried about how they would be treated at a technical conference. You and others here seem to underestimate the bad reputation open source conferences have under at least some subset of our community (females in particular, but not only them). This policy aims to (help) change that perception and make clear that we don't tolerate improper behavior. It's not meant to make our conference politically correct, heck, I don't like that as much as anyone here. But I do care about giving off a signal to woman and others that we want them to be at our conference too. So please look at this policy from THAT point of view: primairily as a message, not as an enforcement tool. As I said before, I doubt issues like these would've been handled much different in the past (although it is possible that if they had come up people would've underestimated the seriousness of them).