
Why Hackers Must Welcome Social Justice Advocates - pron
https://medium.com/@coralineada/why-hackers-must-welcome-social-justice-advocates-1f8d7e216b00#.kp1vthwtq
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WalterSear
In general, since the article is titled with an adversarial generalization,
Social Justice Advocates need to do a better job of projecting the empathy and
inclusionariness that the most vocal of them demand of others, instead of
making bullet points of how other people need to change their behaviour.

They might find that empathizing with others may give them the insight they
need to to influence the cultural norms and social behaviours they wish to
change.

Relevant, but not entirely on this point:
[http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/nov/27/prejudic...](http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/nov/27/prejudice-
discrimination-the-reality)

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venomsnake
___First-time contributors are regularly dismissed and even attacked for naive
implementations of needed functionality. Projects that favor the contributions
of established developers do not leave space for learning, growth and failure
when they punish newcomers for their lack of experience._ __

What the author seems to not recognize is that some of those projects are
critical and some of them are used and protect activists in jurisdictions in
which advocacy actually have non trivial risks.

If the inclusion means that we will get more Heartbleeds - is this really a
price we are willing to pay?

Also - open source is infinitely forkable - if you don't like the community or
culture - just fork it and build your own. I have always disliked the approach
of - join a community - force the community to change so it can accommodate
you. Which is the main tactic a lot of those Social Justice Advocates use.

Edit: Also a persons background don't matter when it comes to implementing FFT
or a red black tree. Which is why tech people tend to ignore it.

