Re: IESG Statement On Oppressive or Exclusionary Language

[Eliot Lear <[e-mail]>]

In the department of meta-meta...

> On 27 Jul 2020, at 16:02, Paul Wouters <[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
> On Jul 27, 2020, at 09:10, Dan Harkins <[e-mail]> wrote:
>> 
>> "harm" not found.
> 
> Unfortunately, this thread has already harmed the IETF community. Not only by showing a lack of empathy to try and be more inclusive when the costs are low, but also by showing how toxic discussions can get at IETF.


On the one hand the IESG has asked for community feedback.  On the other hand, when someone provides a dissent, he is told that the discussion itself is toxic.  Maybe so, but the right response is research results that demonstrate that the language needs to be change, not just a statement from which it is to be inferred that it’s unreasonable to disagree with a proposed change.

Again, the fundamental here is that there is no stable norm of how we should choose technology terms and more to the point, when we should change them.  This is what causes much of the strife.  Let’s get some people to go fix that part.

Some resistance to change of terminology is probably a good thing because otherwise our language itself becomes unstable, and difficult to comprehend as the years go by.  We all know of terms that were in common use in the late 1800s and much of the 20th century that we would not dare use today, so some change is appropriate.

I might also point out that this toxicity you speak of only stopped in a number of other fora when package maintainers just decided to end the debate, and do what they wanted.  Not generally how we work, for better or worse.

Eliot