Hi, Let me first take this opportunity to congratulate everyone elected to the board, and offer my sincere thanks to every one of you who ran for the positions. Thanks also goes out to the election officials who made the process a great success. Job well done by the retiring members of the current board, thanks to you too! A few responses to the current thread inline... On Sun, 2018-04-29 at 12:13 +0200, Richard Brown wrote:
On 29 April 2018 at 11:10, Administrator <admin-JJaFKVBkT/BLBidhBXjKY5m6VD3zJD3B0E9HWUfgJXw@public.gmane.org> wrote:
Although I’m not a voting member bu as along time use and supporter of (open)SuSE, and in the interests of diversity, could I ask for a breakdown of the voting membership and board by gender and racial origin. If the results are as I suspect, what are board’s plans for addressing this?
We now have a Board that is made up of 33% females and 66% non-native english speakers. This suggests that the democratic approach of the openSUSE is not doing a terrible job of ensuring the Board is diverse by at least some measurements.
But regardless I'd like to point to a problem caused when we start looking at people through the lens of "what" they are, rather than "who" they are
I’d like to congratulate Ana for joining the board.
You chose to congratulate Ana (a female from Spain) but seem to have chosen to neglect congratulating Gertjan (an old male from the Netherlands) and Simon (a male from Australia)
If I apply the same logic and inference as you aim towards the project with your questions, it is easy to conclude that you may hold prejudicial feelings against men, or people of Dutch and Australian origin, or maybe old people.
This would be incongruent with the Guiding Principles which this project operates under, which clearly states "We don't tolerate social discrimination"
With all due respect, this is a non sequitur. The idea of increasing female membership in the board, and indeed in the project, is to correct a well-documented historical bias that has existed, and continues to exist, against one gender throughout disciplines; including very strongly in the technological fields. One can't say the same -- at least as far as I am aware of -- about persistent biases against Dutch or Australian people, etc. No matter what you think about the question raised by OP, speaking about the gender divide in these terms trivialises a real problem. I could say the same thing in favour of other communities who have been historically prejudiced against, without being held to your imaginary standard of "social discrimination". Projects engaged in Outreachy [1], for example (where openSUSE is notably absent, but that's another topic for another day) are not engaging in "social discrimination".
I think all 3 candidates elected in this election deserve congratulations, regardless of what they are. They are now part of an openSUSE Board who are responsible for representing all of the openSUSE community, and all races, genders, and other identifying metrics contained therein.
Yes, I agree. Nonetheless...
You state you are "along time use and supporter", and yet I can find no evidence that you congratulated Sarah for her election to the Board a year ago, despite your active involvement in the election discussions at that time.
Assuming you chose to congratulate Ana and neglect Gertjan and Simon for what they are, would it not be right to also assume you chose not to congratulate Sarah because of what she is? Doesn't that imply that you have a problem with German women, or perhaps all Germans?
...OP chooses to cheer for one of the elected board members a little bit more; does that necessitate all this reaction, really?
Do you perhaps see how this rabbit hole leads nowhere productive?
Only if you shoot right past the point.
It's important that the openSUSE Project is a free and open Project for anyone to contribute to. I promise, as part of the openSUSE Board responsible for such complaints, to tirelessly pursue and prosecute any complaint that the Project is failing in that goal.
We do not need to force our users or contributors to share their personal racial or gender identity information to accomplish that. We have no right to any data which we do not need in order to operate as a Free/Open Source Community. In fact I personally think it's very important that our users and contributors have the option to not share such sensitive information with us.
Agree with this; but perhaps we can as a project do affirmatively more to be welcoming of under represented communities, without having members share their DNA and whatnot.
I greatly appreciate the fact that we have contributors who feel able to be part of this project entirely under an identity of their choosing, perhaps one which is significantly different from the identity they hold when interacting with other communities or legal entities.
I strongly feel that such an approach is the true way to fostering diversity within openSUSE, which is a worthwhile goal, long held as part of our projects Guiding Principles.
It's one thing having a worthwhile goal, doing something worthwhile toward achieving said goal is altogether different. I, for one, would love to see the question of diversity at least discussed in the project without it being trivialised and glossed over like this. Cheers. [1] https://www.outreachy.org/ -- Atri Bhattacharya Mon 30 Apr 00:55:43 CEST 2018 Sent from openSUSE Tumbleweed 20180425 on my laptop. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org