Planet Fedora guidelines?

Fri Jun 18 17:53:16 UTC 2010

If this discussion were happening on an Ubuntu list because they were
butthurt about a Fedora contributor joining their planet and put up a huge
Fedora logo, I'd be having a damned fine laugh at their expense.

Instead, *we* come across as being butthurt about Ooboontoo.  Plain and
simple.  Makes me sad.

The appropriateness discussion is one thing, and differentiating between
personal and Fedora aggregations seems like a reasonable conversation to me.

But if we can't envision a situation in which a post with a gigantic
ooboontoo logo might just belong on the Fedora planet from time to time,
then I think we're being reactionary and insecure.  And this isn't just Mo,
either.  I think a deep insecurity about ooboontoo has taken root.

We have millions and millions of users to support.  We have those users
because we're awesome.  Do a good job supporting them, and a good job of
telling those stories, and the rest will take of itself.

--g

On Jun 18, 2010 9:54 AM, "Máirín Duffy" <duffy at fedoraproject.org> wrote:

On Fri, 2010-06-18 at 10:36 -0500, inode0 wrote:

> Seriously those days were not very long ago, I'm not talking about the
> dark ages.
Okay sorry for the confusion, I didn't know about the discussion you
referenced or how long ago it happened. I made a compare-contrast
between now and a long while back when our planet used to not be open
and (I thought) of a less controversial nature with a higher quality of
content.

> Agreed, being considerate of others it nice. Some will do that and
> some won't. It isn't a requi...
Yeah, I don't think we can make and enforce rules that people need to be
considerate of each other. E.g., it's not a law in the US that you must
be considerate of others and you won't get arrested for not being
considerate. Such a thing would be ridiculous.

But *culturally* I don't think considerateness should really be an
option. I would really like to see our project with a strong culture
where a lack of considerateness is strongly discouraged. How do we build
that kind of culture?

Here's one idea I have, feel free to dart it up / use it to build a
better idea:

- Have some basic guidelines about what's appropriate to post to planet
and what's not appropriate to post to planet written up and linked to
from the planet sidebar and/or footer.

- Set up a private mailing list / ticket system / something where people
can submit complaints about posts on planet.

- If the post does seem to violate the guidelines, someone (I don't know
who) contacts the poster directly letting them know about the guidelines
and letting them know which guideline they violated and that their post
had upset some people, asking them to consider filtering it from the
planet.

Limiting contact with the poster to one person (hopefully one less
emotionally involved) rather than a deluge of complaints I think comes
off as more friendly, and I think discussing the post in a friendly
manner one-on-one is less confrontational. Overhead of a ticket system /
someone to answer the tickets is an issue though.

If you don't talk to the person how do you build the culture? I can see
how you'd read this as policy=>enforcement, but I don't think the point
is to hunt people down and punish them. I think the point is to build a
better culture, and you can't do that by just plugging your ears and
covering your eyes to things that aren't compatible with the culture
you're trying to build.

> The line was pretty clearly drawn in my mind. Planet contributors can
> pretty much talk about an...
What are those constraints?

>
> > But how about sexualized photos of scantily-clad women? I'm not cool
> > with that. Maybe som...
(I hope I'm not coming off too touchy on this subject b/c I'm female,
and it probably goes without saying but I wanted to make it clear I'm
totally not offended if you still disagree with me on the above point.)

I would argue though just because they are seen every day on television,
billboards, and in magazines doesn't mean they aren't a problem there as
well. There are plenty of teenage girls killing themselves via anorexia
or bulemia... I've heard of little girls ~8 years old telling people
they are "on a diet."

Also images like that aren't equally tolerated in every country / area.
I know of a handful of popular magazines in particular that re-jigger
their layouts and photo choices for publication in particular
countries.

That aside, I feel really strongly that if Planet has content that isn't
work safe, something is wrong. There's a reason there are particular
things that aren't considered appropriate at work - because the focus at
work is supposed to be on work! Particular images are considered sexual
harassment, because they support a culture where women are second-class
citizens, and they incite negative emotional reactions in people making
them less able to get their job done.

So I would argue for planet content guidelines encouraging posts of a
nature that would be appropriate to discuss with work colleagues - cute
puppies, family ski trip, new cool phone - kosher. Your night out at the
strip club or your allegiance to your company's competitor's products -
probably not so smart to bring up at work.

> > To me it seems there are clearly classes of posts that aren't
> > acceptable.
>
> Sure. But an...
I have a really hi-res screen and that logo is still obnoxiously big.
Maybe it wouldn't have bothered me as much if it was a reasonable
size...

> > First of all, did you take a look at the link he provided? To me, it
> > appears to be a commer...
Well, the link did look less-than-innocent to me.

> > Secondly, are you criticizing me for bringing this up at all? How have I
> > been not excellent...
Of course and I believe the same about you :)

>
> I do, however, think that all the high level emphasis and talk about
> hall monitoring, toxic a...
I think maybe though, you're putting a particular negative spin on it
that isn't quite fair. E.g., if you look at the other side, if we don't
do anything and just 'let it all hang out' - it seems like individuals
don't always have the correct judgment in what to post, which leads to
posts that contribute to a negative atmosphere around the project or
even open source in general. Silence tends to be interpreted as an
endorsement.

For example, there is a very real misogynistic atmosphere around open
source projects in general:
http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Category:Incidents

I'm really sad that Planet Fedora is cited there (although it's far from
the worst incident on there, see
http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/CouchDB_talk)

This kind of stuff goes on then we wonder why there aren't more women
involved in open source....

I think why we keep hemming and hawing about the issue here is because
freedom is such an important value to our community, and anything
appearing to be censorship evokes a visceral negative reaction. But
please, let's also consider those whose freedom is being impinged on
when we let people post whatever they want without any guidelines or
consequences. For example, we have freedom of speech in the US, but we
also have defamation laws....

~m

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