Hi all, It is surprising to me that a certain individual participant in ASF forums seems to be using a swastika as their Google profile photo. The impact of this is that ASF users which use GMail to interact with the mailing lists, are presented with this swastika whenever reading or interacting with ASF forums using GMail.
To be clear, this symbol can have alternate meanings, and it may not be intentionally being used as Nazi symbol. Additionally, even if this individual holds to certain ideologies which may be antithetical to ASF community inclusive values, they may act entirely professional and in accordance with ASF code of conduct on Apache forums. So, I don't want to imply that the profile photo is indicative of their ASF interactions... it may be an entirely separate thing. My main inquiry here is to question whether or not there is a concern, because the use of such profile photos may actually have consequences of deterring potential new committers, because Apache may be indicted by association. Is there something we wish to do about this? Is it a non-issue? I really don't know. All I know, is my gut tells me that I'm bothered when I see it (I use GMail). But, I don't want to overreact, or start a witch hunt. I'm genuinely curious if this is something we want to address at all. If the profile photo is used on ASF infrastructure (JIRA, affiliated as a member of the Apache org on GitHub, etc.), then I think we probably do want to address it in the Code of Conduct. However, unrelated services like Google profile photos... that may not be something we want to address, because the web mail client users use is not related to ASF services (even if it were know for user that it impacted ASF community by deterring potential new community members). In any case, I don't raise this issue to demean the individual whose profile photo came to my attention... this is not an attack on them. Again, this is not a witch hunt. -- Christopher
