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I believe people are A LOT tougher than groups like Geekfeminism give them credit for. Telling them to "get good at coding then come back and contribute" is act

I believe people are A LOT tougher than groups like Geekfeminism give them credit for. Telling them to "get good at coding then come back and contribute" is actually better for people than "come on in, we focus on being super inclusive" or even worse "you don't code at all, but please chime in on our project". People need internal drive to excel, no external welcoming will make that happen. Coding well is damn hard, by its very nature it's not a very inclusive thing. Very few have the capacity to do it well. I prefer to focus on them than on the masses that will never be great coders. I don't think pretending like everyone can and should be involved is useful. I'm a minority from a poor background. No one encouraged me to code, I couldn't even afford the tools I needed. I would read computer magazines in the supermarket and write psudeo-code on paper at home. I'm now a very successful software engineer. Regardless of how unimportant you think my own experience is, it IS quite possible to succeed if you're talented and from an under represented group, no "safe spaces" needed. Just tenacity, an interest in the subject matter and self-drive.

JoshTriplett 11y ago
I'm not talking about ability to code, and projects don't necessarily need to invite people who don't already know how; that's a separate issue. It might be a good idea, and I do think you're also undervaluing non-code contributions, but that's not at all the kind of "welcoming" I'm talking about here. For the people who do know how to code, there's an additional barrier of dealing with people who (for a few examples) like to shout about how anyone who could possibly write such terrible code should die to save important people the trouble of dealing with them, or who talk about "how to explain to your wife or girlfriend", or who give conference presentations featuring lingerie models and pornstars. Nobody should have to put up with that, or should be told to grow a thicker skin. Not wanting to put up with that does not mean someone doesn't know how to code. And allowing that kind of thing in your project disproportionately tends to exclude some groups more than others.
- exstudent2 11y ago
  Open source has a solution for this, fork it. Don't like the bikini guys' attitude? Git clone and now you're rid of them. People are centralizing the philosophy behind a project more than is necessary.
  - JoshTriplett 11y ago
    As usual for a FOSS project, forking is a last resort. You start out trying to convince the project you're working on, with its existing community, just as you would for some other kind of change. Calling attention to the problem can also help. If all else fails, sure, forking the project may potentially be an option to solve the problem (in which case you'd still need to convince (a subset of) the community around that project to join the fork). But that's not always an available option, depending on the project and the circumstances that lead you to working on it. As for communities, no, "fork it" is not a universal solution to problems within communities, conferences, professional events, and other environments. But even in cases where the approach finally ends up being to go start new, more welcoming environments, that's still a case for codes of conduct and similar; even if you're successful in moving a community elsewhere, if the same set (or a new set) of awful people show up with their same behavior, you need something to show what standards a community expects. And much like the Zen of Python, "explicit is better than implicit". I'm also noticing a conspicuous lack of any response to the actual behaviors I was referring to; you're dismissing that as behavior that someone ought to have to tolerate or go start their own project. This problem ought to be as universally recognized in projects as buffer overflows are. And rather than playing whack-a-mole, it makes sense to try to get better solutions in place. For instance, getting support from major hosting sites, or otherwise creating larger meta-communities of people who agree that this is a bad idea, to avoid having a different set of standards (or lack of standards) in every project. And just as it's a bad idea to write your own software license rather than using a standard one, it's a bad idea to write your own code of conduct rather than using a standard one.
    - exstudent2 11y ago
      > I'm also noticing a conspicuous lack of any response to the actual behaviors I was referring to; you're dismissing that as behavior that someone ought to have to tolerate or go start their own project. Absolutely. Why should I judge anyone? I'm not forced to use their project. Last I checked lingerie and porn weren't illegal. If someone wants to represent themselves like that, then more power to them. Not every project is a corporate project and not all are going to come from that politically correct environment. I would no sooner tell someone that they couldn't fill a project with sexually explicit terms than I would tell a songwriter to not use sexually explicit lyrics.

JoshTriplett 11y ago

I'm not talking about ability to code, and projects don't necessarily need to invite people who don't already know how; that's a separate issue. It might be a good idea, and I do think you're also undervaluing non-code contributions, but that's not at all the kind of "welcoming" I'm talking about here. For the people who do know how to code, there's an additional barrier of dealing with people who (for a few examples) like to shout about how anyone who could possibly write such terrible code should die to save important people the trouble of dealing with them, or who talk about "how to explain to your wife or girlfriend", or who give conference presentations featuring lingerie models and pornstars. Nobody should have to put up with that, or should be told to grow a thicker skin. Not wanting to put up with that does not mean someone doesn't know how to code. And allowing that kind of thing in your project disproportionately tends to exclude some groups more than others.

exstudent2 11y ago
Open source has a solution for this, fork it. Don't like the bikini guys' attitude? Git clone and now you're rid of them. People are centralizing the philosophy behind a project more than is necessary.
- JoshTriplett 11y ago
  As usual for a FOSS project, forking is a last resort. You start out trying to convince the project you're working on, with its existing community, just as you would for some other kind of change. Calling attention to the problem can also help. If all else fails, sure, forking the project may potentially be an option to solve the problem (in which case you'd still need to convince (a subset of) the community around that project to join the fork). But that's not always an available option, depending on the project and the circumstances that lead you to working on it. As for communities, no, "fork it" is not a universal solution to problems within communities, conferences, professional events, and other environments. But even in cases where the approach finally ends up being to go start new, more welcoming environments, that's still a case for codes of conduct and similar; even if you're successful in moving a community elsewhere, if the same set (or a new set) of awful people show up with their same behavior, you need something to show what standards a community expects. And much like the Zen of Python, "explicit is better than implicit". I'm also noticing a conspicuous lack of any response to the actual behaviors I was referring to; you're dismissing that as behavior that someone ought to have to tolerate or go start their own project. This problem ought to be as universally recognized in projects as buffer overflows are. And rather than playing whack-a-mole, it makes sense to try to get better solutions in place. For instance, getting support from major hosting sites, or otherwise creating larger meta-communities of people who agree that this is a bad idea, to avoid having a different set of standards (or lack of standards) in every project. And just as it's a bad idea to write your own software license rather than using a standard one, it's a bad idea to write your own code of conduct rather than using a standard one.
  - exstudent2 11y ago
    > I'm also noticing a conspicuous lack of any response to the actual behaviors I was referring to; you're dismissing that as behavior that someone ought to have to tolerate or go start their own project. Absolutely. Why should I judge anyone? I'm not forced to use their project. Last I checked lingerie and porn weren't illegal. If someone wants to represent themselves like that, then more power to them. Not every project is a corporate project and not all are going to come from that politically correct environment. I would no sooner tell someone that they couldn't fill a project with sexually explicit terms than I would tell a songwriter to not use sexually explicit lyrics.