Hi Russ, others,
I must admit that I do support Pride Month but I was a bit uncomfortable
that this was not discussed among wider Debian community. More on points
below!
On 7/1/19 7:10 PM, Russ Allbery wrote:
Adrian Bunk <b...@debian.org> writes:
Why should Debian honor people in the US of one specific race?
Because they are part of our community and the gesture would be meaningful
to them. To me, this is like asking why Debian should be acknowledge the
death of a contributor, or why Debian should congratulate a project member
on a major life milestone, or celebrate a project member winning an award.
And, already obviously there is part of community that feels uneasy
about it. I am fine with and we should acknowledge what our members do
(we acknowledge good parts and we should clearly state against bad parts
(such as banning devs for hostile behavior)) but I honestly don't think
that we should promote something that is important for one part of
population (which some of our members are). As stated from others, we
then become too much political and while first and foremost, we are
community of people, we were to this point community of people that
gathers around of idea of software freedom. That can imply that we are
quite liberal in nature (and we do have a welcoming diversity
statement), we should be careful to easily slip into more political
context because we will always end up choosing sides (we even didn't do
that but we all saw how choosing Israel for DebConf was taken by some
Arab/Muslim members/users).
We do things like this because we are not a computer program. We are a
community of living, breathing people who care about each other and who
want to celebrate and support and welcome each other.
It might make sense for you to honor them inside your country, but for
the other 95% of the population of this planet they are just people with
the privilege of living in the US.
They are Debian project members. That's the part that matters.
In my opinion, and as Russ explained about becoming political is
basically unavoidable, I would be actually up for celebrating things
that can (should?) be worldwide celebrated - community celebrating Pride
Month is in my opinion a worldwide community. Celebrating specific
racial/national/religious things, I think that should be left out for
multiple reasons: nations change through history and if you celebrate
holiday of one nation, you can easily miss how it offends the other
nation, same goes for race and religion.
So LGQBT, Software Freedom, Universal Healthcare, Basic Income etc - yes
(it affects all human kind)
Hispanic/Black/Jewish/Green/Orange/Blue things - no, because they are
specific to certain group and diversity statement is all-inclusive for
that purpose, no need to pinpoint specific groups. That said, I like
celebrations (good way to find out about different cultures/things), so
maybe, just maybe we could have these things still being issued by
Publicity Team but with some specific Headline Tag like "Debian
Diversity Celebration: Today we celebrate US Black Heritage" and then
some text about its history etc - that way it would be informative and
fun IMHO.
Just my 2c,
Z