Re: IESG Statement On Oppressive or Exclusionary Language

[Richard Barnes <[e-mail]>]

On Mon, Jul 27, 2020 at 12:33 PM Eliot Lear <lear=[e-mail]>
wrote:

> 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.
>

I would just like to push back on the idea of there being a dichotomy
here.  There is a lot of room for feedback and even dissent that is not
toxic.

For me where the "toxic" line is crossed is when folks start to invalidate
the experiences of others.  We've seen this in other venues, notably in the
RFC series discussion.  A newcomer says "This is hard for me" or "This
doesn't meet my needs" and hears back "It's not hard" or "It meets my needs
just fine".  Here, some folks are saying "This sort of language makes it
harder for me to participate" and some messages in this thread are saying
back "This isn't a concern".

So like I said in my very first message to this thread, if this discussion
could be had from a place of empathy for our fellow contributors here, I
think we would make a lot more progress.

--Richard



> 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
>
>