Comments on Mariatta Wijaya, 2019
Last modified by Patrick Masson on 2019/03/17 21:30
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Hello,
You mention efforts to strive for diversity.
What efforts will you take to ensure true diversity in viewpoints and thought processes rather than a team who's diversity is only skin deep, as is seen so often these days?
This comment reeks of the tired dog-whistle of substituting "conservative" viewpoints for "diversity". Diverse *backgrounds*, including race, gender, education, nationality, religion, etc (see Intersectionality) all contribute to more inclusive and diverse teams. There is not "diversity in thought" without the acknowledging that there is not diversity without intersectionality. That is to say: even if you find the two most vehemently disagreeing people they do not contribute to overall diversity and inclusive unless they come from different categories in the scheme of intersectionality. By building a diverse team in terms of the categories of intersectionality, you will naturally build a team that's diverse in thought.
Speaking about Mariatta specifically, she has shown time and time again with her work on Python and PyCascades that she values diversity and recognizes the role of power dynamics throughout the technology and open-source communities. She is a true leader and trailblazer here.
The anonymous person presents a fiction: that there is a center ground between viewpoints which tend to marginalize or exclude people and those which do not, and that it would be "democratic" to establish that center ground within an organization (this time OSI). There is no such center ground, and establishing such a thing would not promote democratic ideals of equal representation. And obviously the purpose of a diversity program is to assure that those people are not marginalized.
This fiction of "viewpoint diversity" exists to move the perception of discriminatory and marginalizing viewpoints toward an imaginary center in the public eye, when they belong in a rejected extreme which would justly be excluded from discourse by an organization like OSI.
I guess this is a form of moral relativism, which is itself a form of cognitive relativism. Silly ideas, and dangerous ones because they can justify any hate, any lie. Truth and falsehood do exist, so do good and evil, and some viewpoints thus are bad and wrong.
So I reject your sentiment that ethnic, racial, gender, religious and sexual orientation diversity result in diversity that is "only skin deep". And I suggest that the candidate this is attached to ignore the question.
While I'm sure you have the best of intentions, I hope you aren't in any position of leadership in FOSS. You come of as excessively confrontational over non-FOSS politics.
While you seem like a very good person, yet I hope you are not selected.
I have seen on your blog that you want to replace Python bug management with Github issues. I think it's a mistake. While you have a lot a good technical arguments, you miss a very important point: naming. By replacing 'bug' by 'issue', Github-only project management makes a very profound meaning impact on project. Naming is a very important thing, if you give an incorrect name to something you can impact the software you write and many other things.
This renaming from bug to issue is really the move from developers doing their project, the one they are caring for, to professional developers as salaried mercenaries, who no longer care for the software they have built. When you have written a 'bug' in 'your' software, it's your problem and you can't wash your hands of it. When there is an 'issue' with software, it's the customer's service problem. When you are paid by your new boss, the software you have written for some 'open source' project is no longer your responsability, you just shrug and forget it. Other have to fix it. If the remaining developers are paid for that, great. If not though luck for people relying on it. They better have to have money.
I have seen projects who have switched to Github only management and looking back at old (no longer managed) bug manager there was active bug janitoring. With the Github project there is not any. No one is caring. People are adding false issues (misconfiguration problems) and these entries are just ignored, leading to huge backlogs that nobody are looking at anymore.
Good bug janitoring can happen with Github project only if the project is managed by one company, where the bug janitoring is the responsability of paid employees, but it's unlikely (paid bug management is more profitably handled on private service)
Dedication to quality can happen with professional developers too, but it's almost always happening with small businesses, where the owner is writing the software and leading the project.
So the problem of professional software is not professional by itself, it's the mercenary approach of developers always searching for the better new job. Open source software has a good quality generally, but it's because people writing it traditionally actually care for their stuff (lot of free/open source software originate from universities, and this is still very important for Python). If this changes, and it is already happening in some cases, no amount of marketing will hide the fact that the software is buggy and get worse. Automatic testing can only do so much, lack of real people caring for the project can't replace it.
I am not sure that you will see the problem. Maybe you are too young, or really you share the 'professional' way of looking at free software: just a way - among many others- of making money. Anyway I hope that Ms Hall is selected instead, she seems to really care about non-professional people and IMO it's a bigger problem for open source than diversity as you see it (people using free software but not writing free software can be diverse too - it can be good than there is more developers from Indonesia winning money contributing to open source software, but it's good also if generally people in Indonesia *use* free software)