Re: Diversity and offensive terminology in RFCs

[Niels ten Oever <[e-mail]>]

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
> 

-- 
Niels ten Oever
Researcher and PhD Candidate
Datactive Research Group
University of Amsterdam

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