Small blog on divisiveness, and flock related DEI meeting stuff because I wasn't able to attend flock:

The Water Cooler
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Hi Everyone:

I decided to get on the forums today, and discuss some issues. There is some people who are producing a lot of negative press on x.com of this project. If you guys remember correctly, I came to the Rochester, NY DEI meeting and personally attended.

DEI policies, from what I saw from the meeting was about allowing everyone to contribute. In the last 2 years there has been hostile forks and so much political hostility to this policy. I don’t understand it.

I saw no arguments or hostility when I was at the meeting in 2024. I offered some suggestions about going more international after I saw firsthand the skill of the East and West African computer scientists on projects, and getting out of the EU-US airspace. That hasn’t entirely happened for Flock meetings but that’s okay.

These people on twitter forgot that major contributors to computer science has been Women, Minorities, and LGBT. My family has been in the USA since 1840, and anyone well aware of the history of Computer Science has notice that the hardliners have not won in cryptography competitions.

The people who even were able to get me this high in computer science so that I could contribute valuable IP to this project, were African-American women, as well as Bangladesh women where I was published in the IEEE as first author.

Going to a University that fully accepted everyone and didn’t discriminate students which was an HBCU (Winston-Salem State University), allowed me to understand other perspectives outside of my Welsh/German/English/French ancestry perspective.

Computer Science is not like the U.S. Military.

Computer Science needs DEI honestly over other industries, and it’s difficult to argue with the policy like some other industrial sectors do do.

Even as a Jr. Contributor, I am putting in my .02 and will stay with this project, and not ‘hostile fork’ certain projects, I mostly contribute to Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning.

I have 3 years of experience in Computer Science, and I am working at the moment as an adjunct professor at Southern New Hampshire University as an Adjunct professor in Computer Science.

My current contract with my employer SNHU, would require me to stay on U.S. military base only, and I don’t know what hotels are available on U.S. Military base, I know there is a bases in the UK, and in Wiesbaden, and Frankfurt.

Even as a civilian I don’t have a U.S. Passport, I have only a Live ID which proves my citizenship, and I would have to inquire lodgings at the U.S. government property federal installation only, such as RAF base or Weisbaden hotels. I am allowed at U.S. Army Headquarters for that reason, even without Military ID. I wasn’t able to come to 2025 Flock to Fedora for that reason.

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I love moderators.

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Both @ludiusvox and @lendenu : this is a warning, you have no right to offend others, their values, their country or way of life.

… and it is not useful to “preemptively assume & accuse” those who read your posts are hostile or trolls.

We can allow a lot in the water cooler, but “flaming others” is not part of it. I also think that European soldiers of the Napoleonic war era have little to do with modern DEI: this goes beyond the scope of what we can moderate here because these are complex topics whose research and debates can fill libraries, and which should not be simplified to a few sentences, especially if they do not add value/facts to the very topic you want to discuss.

Please read the Code of Conduct and the Four Core Values of Fedora. They might shed some light about what this forums is intended for.

I have hidden related comments: you both can now adjust them (according to our rules and with the assumption that we all are being friends and not enemies here) in order to unhide them again.

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That’s indeed a risk of DEI policies, may it be formal or informal DEI (but also of other means). But it can also achieve the opposite: integrating groups that are excluded, such as …

… getting rid of ideologies that suggest to exclude some people from constructive coding collaborations (or simply exclude their code) although they can code as good as everyone else.

I would agree that DEI has the goal to obsolete DEI, and until then, it has the goal to integrate those who ain’t integrated yet (or normalize those who ain’t normalized yet), shifting the focus to what/how they do rather than what/how they are.

If and when what DEI policies are appropriate is always blurred, and you know for sure not before projects are done & outcomes measured (and even then the outcome might be blurred). The risks of DEI are the same than of not doing DEI policies, it just affects different groups. In the end, the goal is make everyone capable to collaborate with everyone, which also adds the highest potential for innovation, and this might need a careful alignment of when/where/how/what DEI policies are implemented (or not).

A problem I see is that DEI is simplified to “one thing” one implements or not. But that term can refer to a lot of different things, some have scientific backing that supports their capability to integrate groups not yet integrated, others might be only means of marketing or “short-sighted emotional responses” that can cause more harm than use. I think it should be less discussed “if DEI yes or no” but more discussed what specific means make sense in what situation/context.

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They are intended to prevent the unjust exclusion of minority groups or individuals, either systemic or circumstantial. In practice, it’s often the people who were condoning the exclusion of those groups in the first place that would frame DEI policies as divisive.

This is a contentious take, including the choice of words that suggests insincerity or frivolousness on the part of the discriminated group.

This is exactly what DEI strives for, whether it always has the intended effect or not. If people can make good contributions, they should not be excluded from a position or social sphere because of their personal circumstances, race, gender or orientation.

Your reaction suggests otherwise. DEI doesn’t hurt you in any way yet you react like it does.

DEI ≠ affirmative action, it’s anti-discrimination.

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While I support equality as a principle and therefore decry all “anti-discrimination” law/policy that specifies traits or groups that thou shalt not discriminate against/based on rather than simply “thou shalt not discriminate, end of”. I often find myself in opposition to “anti-discrimination” policies because I find they do discriminate, they just do so “positively”, which kind of defeats the point of “anti-discrimination”.

Preamble aside, I fail to see the point of anti-discrimination policies in an online FOSS project where the only contribution is intellectual (be it code or ideas) where they are either good/agreeable or not with no room for a person’s physical or mental characteristics to have any influence at all - that is to say that unless someone bases their code or argument on their characteristics (which outside of accessibility, why would you? What does being homosexual, for example, have to do with code or features in software?) there is nothing to discriminate against, making this whole exercise redundant from the get-go and at worst bait for extremists on both sides.

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This is a bit naive perhaps, it is for instance a well known fact that in many techy online places women/girls may be treated differently just because they present themselves as female. This includes not being taken as seriously, being objectified and/or harassed. Women may often feel they need to behave like ‘one of the boys’ to not be socially excluded or targeted.

Not perceiving that as a problem is easier if you are not on the receiving end of such treatment yourself.

In a lot of online places, people are judging and treating each other on a lot of factors outside of the quality of their intellectual contributions. Taking measures against that type of discrimination is a reasonable form of DEI policy. FOSS projects are social environments, they don’t solely revolve around lines of code.

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This to me seems like more of a respect issue than a discrimination one, and yes it’s a valid one, people who don’t have a reasonable respect for others do need a slap on the wrist and maybe more if warranted.

I do wonder though, as regards the “need to behave like ‘one of the boys’” point, how much of that is the aforementioned respect issue and how much of that is a difference in community culture. I should imagine that men going into predominantly female spaces have the same issues but so long as everyone is respectful I wouldn’t push to change the culture.

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I should know better and not add anything to this topic but here we are.

The word “respect” comes from latin and it means “to look again”, meaning something is so important, precious or dangerous you need to check on it several times.

The consequence is “respect” is either something that comes with the true nature of the respected object, like you make sure to shut down something before leaving because it is either expensive and/or it can explode if left unattended or something that is earned, like you seek the advice from somebody who you know is very competent on something or you thank somebody who sacrificed for your own good.

Respect is not something that everybody deserves for a simple logical reason: inflation. The more people get respect, the less respect is meaningful, like the more people gets diamonds, the less diamonds are valued. In other words, saying everybody is to be respected is like to say nobody is respected, since the are all equal so there is not reason to value one more than another.

It is not “respect”, it is the rules of the game. If all players are the same, the only thing that can regulate each individual behavior are the rules. Now, can I be forced by some regulation to make a friend of everybody I meet? Can I be forced to even talk to everybody I meet? Can I be forced by some regulation to adapt to everybody’s else beliefs, opinions, customs, tastes? Can the whole humankind be forced into a grey indifferent mass as mix of all colors, a white noise mix of all sounds, etc?

I would be worried by such a distopian nightmare.

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In a collaborative project like Fedora, refusing to talk to certain individuals, and not showing a degree of recognition & allowance for others beliefs, opinions & customs is unhelpful to the project and should be challenged.

Also, please show respect to the word “dystopian” by spelling it correctly :wink:

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Hello @py0xc3 (Chris), since It took me so long to get a hold of a moderator. Do you mind if I correct my post and get it back up? It’s difficult on my own on a hot mic to obey community standards. I do not mind content moderation.

Am I permitted to adjust the language and repost?

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Yes, you can adjust (edit) the post above, and once you changed it, it will be unhidden. You do not need to write a new post. Please consider the points I made above. Thanks for understanding :classic_smiley:

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@py0xc3 Thank you sir! I am more than willing to obey forum guidelines. I just have difficulty on my own interpreting the community standards solo.

I have adjusted any language considered to be incendiary or demeaning.

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As much as I appreciate this forum, the anonymous marking, even after working with the moderator, and post maintenance, makes it not worthwhile to use this forum system as a communication medium.

I will stay on Linkedin, that is the #1 business network.

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BlueSky is a very similar system to this forum as I am finding out. I have other systems. Slack, Linkedin, Discord, Meta to some extent, and Matrix chat.

I cannot use Blue sky, there was a recent problem on BlueSky even in the last few days.

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Being part of a “collaborative project” is a choice. You chose to be part of the “community”, at least until you can live with the “policies”. The moment some “policy” is enforced and you don’t like it, you can quit the “community”.

Besides the obvious difference between being part of a “community” and living in some place, there is another issue. What if being part of the “community” is not a choice but a right? If I have the right to be part of the community then anything that pushes me away is a “violation” of the rules. So here we are with the usual problem with freedom, my own freedom ends where somebody’s else freedom begins. The solution is what I wrote about “respect”, like respecting everybody means respect values nothing, everybody’s freedom is granted when nobody is free.

On a side note, I am forced to write in english because of some well know events in the first half of '900, it is not a choice. When Napoleon ruled over my place the “conventional” language was french. Besides, France helped the birth of the USA against Britain and it also helped the birth of my own nation against the Austrian-Ungarian empire. We payed for that giving France the region of Nice (the city) and the Savoy if I remember it correctly (I was in school more than 40 years ago). So before that we wrote in german and french and spanish, depending on the time and the ruler.

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@lendenu That’s really not a bad argument. I have at least one ancestor from France, I think they left about that time period to Texas, shortly after the Texas revolution.

My blood type even O- is French blood type of the Basque/Toulouse people.

Texas has almost unrelentless economic momentum at this point. The U.S. government has so much cash reserves, that we can print so much money for semiconductor fabrication. Texas people invented the integrated circuit, yes the TSMC has some fabs, which are borrowed from Intel and Netherlands. The US, can produce fab systems 10% above cost, in a lot of architectures.

It’s hard to decide whether it’s worth it or not to compete in certain things.

I don’t mind discussion, but at certain points, it’s not worthwhile for me to conduct extensive maintenance on a forum system, when I can fire and forget on Linkedin or Meta Platforms.

The email reminder is the primary benefit of this platform, because otherwise I would forget to log in!

Have a nice day @lendenu

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@lendenu I am going to go shopping. I like Linux a lot, after being on this Chromebook for a long time, I haven’t been on my desktop for a while. I put on F42, but it hasn’t had a measure-able improvement from F41, and ChromeOS has been working good for me. If I am able to get full cluster GPU acceleration from Oracle, and they don’t censor and have edgyness, I will give Oracle Culture a try.