Le 19/09/2012 11:43, Gijs Kruitbosch a écrit :
On 19/09/2012 09:31 AM, David Bruant wrote:
Le 18/09/2012 19:00, John Jensen a écrit :
Hi David,
The hiring process, for various reasons
cannot be considered as a meritocracy
Could you expand on that a bit?
In answers by other people, it's been answered, but here are some
elements:
First, Mozilla can only hire in places where it has a legal structure.
This is a discussion which was had before in the more general sense
that ('even') the community is overrepresented in some places / social
strata / genders / ... and underrepresented in others.
I was not talking about how Mozilla is representative of the world.
Representativeness is an issue some care about a lot, but I don't at
all; that was not my point.
I would say that just because we are practically speaking unable to
completely 'level the playing field' (the gaps are too many and too
wide for Mozilla alone to fix the world, though we should do our best
to help!) before we 'measure' merit doesn't mean that we can't
consider Mozilla a meritocracy. I don't think it's useful to say we're
not a meritocracy pending such leveling of the playing field for
everyone; from that perspective, no meritocracy can exist in the
current state of the world. Parallels exist with other -cracies like
democracy, which is used as a label even though often certain subsets
of 'the people' have no right to vote (minors, criminals, non-citizen
residents, etc.).
It seems we agree in saying that Mozilla is not a meritocracy. There are
points on which Mozilla can improve itself and as you wrote, some other
points where it's not possible. No big deal.
Not being a meritocracy because we acknowledge the issues and
limitations of being one is already an excellent place to be in by my
standards.
But as said Henri Sivonen: "I think Mozilla would give a more truthful
picture of its decision making if it didn't describe itself as a
meritocracy."
Maybe that instead of "meritocracy" we need to find (or create?) a
better wording that takes meritocracy into account, but is descriptive
of how we make our community stronger and more diverse (being
representative of the world not necessarily being a end-goal) by making
some choice through other criterion than (internal) merit.
Then, if people were being hired only based on merit, only people from
the community would be hired, by definition.
That seems to imply you cannot have merit outside of the community,
which seems wrong (perhaps I'm misreading?). When people working on
other open source projects, or on open data, or on privacy protection,
or on net neutrality, or on web education, ..., apply to Mozilla, I
would certainly hope such work would be taken into account, because
all of those, at least to me, would constitute 'merit' in one sense or
another.
I have nothing better to say than what Henri Sivonen wrote already in a
previous response:
"If you tell people that a project is a meritocracy, they will rightly
assume that it means that the people who decide are people who have
demonstrated merit *in the context of* the project."
David
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