Re: Diversity and offensive terminology in RFCs

[Anton Ivanov <[e-mail]>]

Err... that is social "science" without a single number on it.

At the very least quote an article with a statistically significant 
survey of engineers who have been horribly offended by the use of 
"master/slave" terminology. I would be interested to see one.

A.

On 9/21/18 3:16 PM, Niels ten Oever wrote:
> Hi Alissa, all,
>
> On 09/21/2018 03:21 PM, Alissa Cooper wrote:
>> I wanted to send a friendly reminder to keep discussions on this list professional, respectful, and courteous, per RFC 3005 and RFC 7154. The sergeants-at-arms are following up with individuals off-list as necessary.
>>
>> Niels, I think there might be two further contributions from you that could be helpful in this discussion. If you have links to relevant research in this area, those might be useful to share. I’m not saying that in the sense that you bear a burden of proof, but really just encouraging you and others to share research results that may be directly relevant if you’re aware of them.
>>> The other helpful item would be a clarification about what is being
> proposed. Are you interested in updating previously published RFCs,
> having authors use different terminology going forward, both, something
> else? Or were you just looking to spark discussion?
>
>
> I think there are two parts of this discussion. The first part is having
> a conversation in our community about the the implications and the power
> of language and metaphors that we use. A seminal paper about this is:
>
> 'Danger! Metaphors at Work in Economics, Geophysiology, and the Internet'
> by Sally Wyatt - Science, Technology, & Human Values, Volume: 29 issue:
> 2, page(s): 242-261 Issue published: April 1, 2004
>
> https://www.exeter.ac.uk/media/universityofexeter/internationalexeter/documents/iss/Wyatt_danger-metaphors_%283%29.pdf
>
> A more concrete and maybe relevant article addressing explicitly the
> master/slave metaphor is:
>
> 'Broken Metaphor: The Master-Slave Analogy in Technical Literature' by
> Ron Eglash - Technology and Culture Vol. 48, No. 2 (Apr., 2007), pp.
> 360-369
>
> https://www.jstor.org/stable/40061475?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents
>
> And another relevant article on the affordances of infrastructure and
> its impact on diverse participation:
>
> '‘Anyone can edit’, not everyone does: Wikipedia and the gender gap' by
> Ford, Heather and Wajcman, Judy (2017) Social Studies of Science. ISSN
> 0306-3127
>
> http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/68675/
>
> The second (more concrete) part of this conversation would be the
> development of a draft which would map potentially problematic language
> and list alternatives for authors to use going forward.
>
> People have already been developing interesting solutions already in
> this thread, so in that sense this discussion has already been useful.
>
> Several people have approached me off-list with inputs for a draft and
> my thinking is that we could maybe have a BoF-session about this in
> Bangkok, since there definitely seems to be interest in the topic.
>
> As always, happy to discuss.
>
> Best,
>
> Niels
>
>> Thanks,
>> Alissa
>>