Re: State of the GNUnion 2020

[Andreas R.]

On Thu, Feb 20, 2020 at 02:45:02PM +0100, Samuel Thibault wrote:

> > On the flip side, an argument is made that your initiative might make GNU
> > more exclusionary because of the extra conditions on what it takes to be a
> > part of it.
> 
> At some point you have to exclude some people in order to include other
> people, yes.  We can see that in various communities: 

Some examples of those communities and their problems might be helpful here 
to see if these communities can provide a useful parallel with GNU.

> That seems to be the ground of what some people do not understand here:
> full inclusiveness can not work, there will always be some people you
> will be excluding one way or the other

Either of these ways could include maintaining a killfile and knowing the 
"/ignore"
command, both actions that should be in reach for GNU maintainers.

Ignoring someone in a private capacity is a powerful tool. If enough 
participants
do so, a troublesome person can effectively be ostracised without having to
formalise any edicts.

In a way, extra social conditions curtail this privilege of personal 
responsibility for
one's interactions with others; if interactions must be deemed appropriate
by some third party, and if you disagree with the practice, you are no 
longer free to ignore others because they can punish you. Obviously some
are not going to be comfortable with that concept in principle, especially 
if no actual need for such extra conditions have been demonstrated.

> Making sure
> that the choice of who you exclude gets written down seems important to
> me.

That's true if and only if you start excluding people from a position of
power in the first place. Otherwise it's just people being people, getting
along with some and ignoring others, as they naturally would.

        thanks,
        Andreas R.