Patryk:
Did you miss the common sense part? If the rules are vague, everything can be proved to be "against the rules".
These rules are for the GNOME Foundation community and the GNOME Foundation community will decide when the rules apply and when they have been broken. I think the GNOME Foundation community is an intelligent, highly educated bunch, and I do not think we need to be so concerned that these guidelines will be used in an abusive or frivolous manner. If, over time, we find that our speaker guidelines are being used in a way that is hampering honest, free speech, then this is something we can discuss and address in the future. Our guidelines are likely to be a living document that will be modified as necessary to ensure that they are used and understood properly. The goal we are trying to achieve with having Speaker Guidelines is to try and help foster an environment where people are more sensitive, aware, and focused on productive discourse.
I believe the rules were defined to stop RMS from making jokes. If you don't like his sense of humor, don't invite him. You don't have to ban all kinds of jokes and sarcasm along the way.
I have a few things to say about this. 1) There is no benefit in making this issue personal. Over the past 2.5 years that I have been on the board, the board has been asked to help address a situation where someone has been offensive at least a half-dozen times. The Speaker Guidelines were created to help deal with this class of problems, not to deal with any particular person who may have been offensive at any particular time. Please lets avoid derailing this discussion by turning it into a discussion about a particular person or situation. 2) When situations do happen, the board is often criticized that we are slow or ineffective at addressing them. One reason these problems are difficult to address is that we do not have any clear ground rules. Considering how difficult it is to get our community to agree on even simple ground rules, I hope people in the GNOME Foundation community can appreciate the difficulty and frustration the board has trying to address problems when they arise. 3) There is no problem with anyone telling jokes in general. That said, there is always a risk when telling a joke that someone might be offended. So the burden is on the speaker to ensure that any joke is appropriate for the audience at a GNOME technical conference. Humor that is at the expense of a minority or which encourage discrimination is not appropriate for a GNOME technical conference regardless of who says them. But this does not mean that jokes are always bad, or that jokes by any particular speaker are always bad. Also, sometimes people say offensive things without really understanding that their words are offensive, or would be interpreted in that way. The GNOME Foundation is highly diverse and made up of people from around the world, and people from different cultures or backgrounds do not always share the same sensitivities. So, when situations happen, it is important to have ground rules to help educate our speakers so that they understand how to be more considerate and effective speakers in the future. Brian _______________________________________________ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list