Re: [Gendispatch] draft charter text: terminology-related WG

[Vittorio Bertola <[e-mail]>]

> Il 12/02/2021 03:04 Stephen Farrell <[e-mail]> ha scritto:
> 
> I'm unsure if looking for definitions is a good way to try
> constrain this or not. I suspect it's not, and that general
> guidance and a few example improvements might be better.

Agreed.

> I'm also against "banning." That's based on my background
> when as a youth I grew up in an environment where censorship,
> more of discussion topics than specific words, was common.
> So I'd hate to see us end up with a blocklist of bad strings.
> But I don't think that's where this is headed.

I think that it would be clearer to state this (the fact that producing a list of banned terms is not in scope) in the charter - as long as there is already agreement, of course. If not, part of the scope should be about deciding between the "hard" approach (these words are banned and no document will be allowed to use them) and the "soft" approach (just suggestions to the authors, perhaps with some kind of recourse mechanism for people that feel offended).

However, what I really care about is that any effort to improve language inclusiveness is actually inclusive. Whenever this discussion comes up, it focuses regularly just on a handful of terms that are deemed offensive to one specific ethnicity in one specific country. While of course this is not the intention, this often feels exclusive to people from other countries and other ethnicities; this became apparent during some past discussions on the main IETF list.

I would specify in the charter that the approach needs to be global and systematic, suggesting to authors that they should consider words that can be offensive to any social group from any part of the world, while at the same time acknowledging that no author can be aware of all the possible negative implications of every word they use, which in turn also change over time, and so this will necessarily be an effort made of repeated cycles and long term convergence; no bad intentions or indifference to the problem should ever be assumed in authors unless there is clear evidence in that direction.

This is also why I would prefer that the charter did not include any specific terms, not even as examples. From one side, we all know what we are talking about, and from the other, any set of examples may sound exclusionary to someone.

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Vittorio Bertola | Head of Policy & Innovation, Open-Xchange
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