
Why I Am Not Speaking at OSCON - randomname2
https://where.coraline.codes/blog/oscon/
======
jackfraser
> But the inclusion of this language, making political affiliation a protected
> class, leads me to believe that alt-right technologists would be as welcome
> at the conference as I would be. Including alt-right technologists who
> display on their clothing, for example, neo-Nazi insignia.

Who are these people? Has this actually happened? Is it going to become
incumbent upon conference organizers to carefully investigate the political
views of every attendee and speaker to ensure they fit some carefully selected
parameters of acceptability?

> To be clear, the code of conduct as it was written in 2016 already
> prohibited harassment of all kinds, including harassment of a political
> nature. But the 2017 language makes political affiliation a protected class,
> which means by my reading (and the Wikipedia definition) that people of
> specific political affiliations qualify for special protection by the
> authorities in charge of the event.

This sounds like a pretty fantastic change to me. If the code of conduct can
serve to enable people from diverse political backgrounds (it's not like a
trans advocate doesn't count as "politically diverse"!) to come together at an
event and not harass or bother each other, isn't it serving its purpose quite
well?

> You can't make marginalized people-- who are enumerated as a protected
> class-- feel safe, and simultaneously make members of political groups who
> stand violently opposed to us feel welcome.

Why not? Your "feeling" of safety unfortunately has to matter less, as
compared to your actual experience of being safe - and if you can get through
the conference without any harassment or people bothering you any moreso than
the general population does on a day-to-day basis, aren't the conference
organizers doing enough?

> You might think that politics don't belong at a technology conference, but I
> would argue that politics and software are so tangled that they cannot be
> reasonably separated.

Largely because of the influence of people like this author, who over the past
few decades have taken one of the most equalizing forces in human history -
the combination of semi-anonymous internet access and open source projects
that welcome any contributor - and have turned it into a war for political
correctness. It was arguably much easier to be a transperson and contribute to
open source in an era where one's personal identity wasn't necessarily as tied
to one's work as it is becoming. Nobody has to care about the politics of User
X if they're submitting good patches and making good technical points.

Can these two spaces not exist with minimized overlap? Can politics not be
kept to politically-themed conferences / forums / venues, and technical ones
try to remain pure on the merit of technical effort and quality?

> Or even simple things, like he/she pronoun selections on sign-up forms. Or
> health and wellness apps that assume that all women menstruate, or that none
> of their users menstruate. All of these technologies are inherently
> political. There is no neutral political position in technology.

I don't see how these things are technical. Technical is the mechanism that
displays the form on the screen, the processes that handle the data behind the
scenes. The actual choice of what's on screen really isn't as much a technical
thing as it is a business thing. There's probably room in some conferences
about user experience for this kind of thing, but it doesn't have to be
shoehorned in everywhere. It would be like going to a car show and complaining
that the cars aren't displayed in your favourite color - it's so immaterial to
the point of the event as to make me question whether the author actually gets
the point of these conferences, which is supposed to be information exchange,
networking, and so forth, not a soapbox for politics.

> Update > Tim O’Reilly published a blog post on LinkedIn saying that the
> language would be removed and apologizing for its inclusion.

Great, so the effort to be _more_ inclusive has been quashed by someone who in
general relies on inclusion efforts. Ironic, much?

