I don’t know what your perception is about SC, but they should work as a group. Tomberek has already said that such issues need to wait until the meeting for consideration.
“There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” — Mark Twain
Firstly, I do not believe the initial post in this thread holds much meaning without additional data and context (no offence intended!). I can’t help but wonder what the point of posting such a message is, except perhaps to spread misleading impressions or unfairly paint this community in a negative light.
After reading through the comments, I reached out privately to one of the participants to understand better. What I found was that the information I was given was either outdated or inaccurate. Yes, decisions within the community have at times upset various people; not only those considered “minorities” (a term I will address later). And yes, there have been individuals who behaved verrrry poorly, but to my knowledge, they have been banned, or they simply left. I see no valid reason for this level of relentless critique.
Having been part of the Nix community for 4 years, I can genuinely say that I have never observed any form of discrimination, whether on GitHub or Matrix… quite the opposite, in fact. I say this carefully, not to dismiss the possibility of issues, but simply to share my personal experience. For me, the project is about Nix, contributions, technical discussions, and ensuring that Nix (the overall project) is better after every single contribution. At no point have I felt the need to delve into the private lives of contributors. Everyone is free to live as they wish outside the project, and I treat all the Nix people I interact with equally, regardless of background, gender, or any other personal attributes.
Reading this thread, I can’t help but feel that the tone undermines the efforts of contributors who genuinely work to create a warm and relax environment. Many of us strive to make everyone feel welcome. I could point out the lack of recognition for this “under-represented community” and these quiet contributors, but that is not where my focus or energy lies. I contribute to the project without expecting accolades or recognition. IMO, labelling certain groups as minorities is itself diminishing, as it reduces complex identities to a single label.
Furthermore, it seems that this thread is approaching this as if it were an isolated issue within the Nix community, when in reality, it is a much broader societal matter. I am not saying improvements are not welcome here, but it is essential to keep in mind that this is a global issue that will hopefully improve over time, and, sadly, it will take time. Let’s keep in mind that forcing representation locally can lead to unfortunate results, as I have seen elsewhere (mostly in workplaces), where positive discrimination places individuals in roles (e.g., for gender balance) that they neither fit nor enjoy… something that, ultimately, harms both the individuals and the organisation, counterproductive and opposite to the goal we initially want to reach.
Finally, this is my first and last time engaging in such a thread. I do not plan on spending more time making my points here. It feels like we are all spending far too much time on this. If even a portion of the energy devoted to this debate went towards actually improving things (like documentation, the website, or pull-request reviews), we’d already be seeing far more progress.
Friends, choose your battles wisely.
I considered if it was even worth responding. But this is quite a wild take, to think that just beacuse you “have never observed” any discrimination means that there has been 0 discrimination. Perhaps you should ask people whomst are oppressed to come forward with their knowledge.
And if you really thought this well you must be oblivious to the acts of the discord (which is improving I’ll admit). Or perhaps you haven’t seen Nixos Woke Invasion - NixOS Wiki which was thankfully dropped before moving to wiki.nixos.org. Or maybe you missed this post
(And yes I know you specified the GitHub or Matrix but these places are not far off from those, and how do you know no ones sending private messages after seeing someone on the matrix)
For any case of suspected discrimination, it’s important to keep some perspective:
- Was it actual discrimination, or was it just a discussion about discrimination? I’ve seen the latter more than the former.
- Did it happen within official project spaces or inofficial ones? The Nix community obviously extends beyond just official spaces, but our mods can’t take action in inofficial spaces.
- If it did happen in official spaces, did the mods take action against it? I’ve personally never seen any act of actual discrimination in official spaces that wasn’t being acted upon by the mods.
I’m glad that your experience was positive. But it seems like you don’t identify as minority, so the issue isn’t about you and your experience, am I wrong?
Maybe so. But the tone isn’t frustrated just for the sake of it: it comes from a place of frustration at years-long issues not getting even the recognition, let alone any solutions. It’s time to face it: these efforts are not enough. Make of it what you will. If you disagree with this basic premise, there’s nothing to talk about here.
Maybe it’s best to ask what minorities themselves think of this label? My opinion is informed by that. Is yours?
Oh, it was. It was devoted towards improving other things for years. Until this year, when the issue became so overwhelming that people who devoted their energy to those other things left the community, and now we’re in deep shit: we have neither the representation figured out nor the people to improve things elsewhere. This strategy failed, terribly, repeatedly.
You know, it’s perfectly fine to not have an opinion on things you haven’t experienced. It’s just a learning opportunity. This thread has a ton of good links with educational materials about the topic, written by people who have spent considerable time on this - so you already have plenty of pointers to go off of. And if you don’t have the time and energy to do this research, that’s fine too - but in that case, better just say nothing or take the many words for it from people who have done that research, or left the community over experiencing many issues related to representation (luckily, they’ve been generous enough to describe their experiences in this very thread).
This is what I do. Can recommend.
Otherwise, you are just propagating the very behaviors that push people out of the community.
I think plural systems/plurality in general and otherkin people need to be explicitly protected honestly.
For next NixCon how about having a group of explicitly reaching to non-male community members to submit talks? This group would not necessarily decide which talks actually get accepted and I don’t think we need to boost these submissions in any way. From another conference (chaos-communication congress), I heard about statistics that these types submissions often are accepted over-proportionally and I believe their submission is anonymous (?) - needs fact checking.
If every person whom is not in a minority responded just like this it would be a vast sea of people claiming we had no discrimination, drowning out any of the voices of the actually oppressed peoples. My point is not to belittle him, but to tell him that he should try to listen to others and their experiences rather then to talk about what he might not have seen.
Even if its not in an official place its still a reflection of a individual and what it means to be a nix community member. I’ll give the example of catppuccin since I moderate for them, we ban people if they send DM advertisements to members of our server. Would what you are saying not mean that we are not allowed to ban this person since it didn’t happen in an official place. If you think “no, of course we should ban them”, then why are you giving a free pass to people who behave poorly outside of official spaces?
Not sure how the ratio of these two matters? Discrimination happens, this is a problem to tackle, period. (Also, why would people spend their time discussing it if there was no real underlying problem?)
Does it matter? To quote myself from https://piegames.de/dumps/enablers-of-abuse/#abuse-happening-outside-of-community-spaces:
Not taking action would send the wrong signal: “We are tolerating a known sexist in our space, as long as they’re nice while we’re looking”. Marginalized people will hear such a message loud and clear, and accordingly consider a community which does such as less safe.
Oh yes, plenty of times. When I was a NixOS mod, there regularly were incidents on which no or only little action was taken against the abuser because the expected backlash by defenders of abusers was higher than the available moderation capacity of dealing with such a fallout. (Btw this dynamic exists elsewhere too, but here it is by far the worst of all community spaces I’ve been moderator for.) That was one of the main reasons why I resigned, because not being able to do the Right Thing sucks.
But also again, I’m unsure why your personal perception of how much this actually happens or not matters? If several people are speaking up to tell that there actually is a problem here, would you mind listening to them for once please? Like, this is not new, we’ve had such discussions on and off over a long period of time, and the main reason we’re still here right now is because people didn’t want to listen and act accordingly.
I’m surprised at the direction this is going. I saw many different issues crop up in the Nix community, but an instance of someone being discriminated against was not one of those things. The most public departures explicitly called out disagreements with leadership/moderators. There was that letter, the DetSys blog post, one of the NixOS 24.05 release managers being banned or not banned…
Even if its not in an official place its still a reflection of a individual and what it means to be a nix community member. I’ll give the example of catppuccin since I moderate for them, we ban people if they send DM advertisements to members of our server. Would what you are saying not mean that we are not allowed to ban this person since it didn’t happen in an official place. If you think “no, of course we should ban them”, then why are you giving a free pass to people who behave poorly outside of official spaces?
The reason why you ban people who spam private messages to people in your server/channel/etc. is because they’re spamming private messages to people in your server. It’s still in the community, even if it isn’t technically directly in the server…
ngl this thread is pushing me away, I’m extremely disappointment with some of the answer here, I thought a lot of you were better than this
It’s proven through research on human nature, and social interaction going back the 1950’s, that if you have a group or network of people in relationships: when the majority of participants cannot share a definition of what problems and barriers are/when different groups have different interpretations, the ability to consolidate solutions and have balance in the group breaks down.
People start to assimilate and contrast events and information into their interpretations, and the problem in part morphs into a battle over who’s perception and interpretation is right.
Part of observed human nature is resistance to change. If you want to introduce change, no matter how much the change may genuinely be needed, you can expect resistance to the change from people with a different non-resonant world view, until those people are ready for that type change. Those who are not resonant, will display resistance to the change. But those who need the change should be listened to, document evidence and information. Don’t burden the people who need the change with also convincing the people who are most resistant to the change.
Some actionable solutions to this are:
-
Provide structured and limited space for people who are identifying genuine problems (maybe they are minority groups, etc). This space should contain people who able to listen, gather facts, organize this information for the organization so that the same discussions do not happen over and over again. (some people have already tried to do this in the past by creating spaces and rules around the spaces).
-
For people who inquire with skepticism or who just have inquiry about the problems that group 1 is identifying, limit this to a different structured space, and designate people who are not from group 1 or 2, if possible, to listen to these inquiries and try to explain the identified problems based on the information gathered and organized for this organization. (this has been tried by our organization in the past to a degree, but probably could be improved. Usually the problem is that the same people with opposing viewpoints are left to re-ignite the battle of interpretation and perception.)
Basically, find and designate people who can listen to the issues from people asking for change, and who can capture and document the facts and information from those people. Then use those facts and information to discuss and explain it to anyone who wants to question about it in a different space. Also gather facts and information from those people. This can be time boxed, and it could be limited in access, other than the gathered facts and information.
Now, have those in governance position offer solutions that synthesize the facts and information, and address the changes needed, in a way that is clearly confirmed to be fair to the majority those involved. Solutions can include positive alternative ways of thinking about the proposed solutions. Fairness can be resolved by comparing with stated group values.
The goal is to try and document and understand what is happening, create a clear shared and unified insight for the majority of people involved, and a place where consolidated solutions can emerge and be carried out.
This actually should not have to be an ongoing exercise, but can be implemented when problems arise. The approach I discuss here is one of the only effective ways for moving away from breakdowns and stuck group/organization/social network issues. This kind of approach for instance had been applied to problems like trying to transition South African communities out of aparthied, and to organizational dilemma in instutions like governments, hospital systems, etc.
Edit: probably this is a lot to ask from this community/organization. Never the less, when dealing with the kinds of problems observed in the nix community, this is the kind of approach that usually works.
(the above is based on decades of research and application by Dr Clare W. Graves. A disclaimer is that I worked for his student Chris Cowan in the early 2000’s on education and application projects)
I think one starting point for improving our inclusiveness as a community is to (A) identify tech communities that do better than us in this regard and (B) study what they do well and try to emulate that. That will also generate a concrete list of actionable things that can be proposed to the Nix Steering Committee to either enact or delegate to the appropriate team.
As one of those gender minorities who got pushed out, the first thing you need to solve if you want to be inclusive is these damn conversations. They happen over and over and over again and I’m sick of them. I held out a lot longer than most people, but if you can’t solve the issue of people pushing back against the concept of improving diversity, you won’t improve diversity. It’s that simple.
Yeah, I’m outta here. Please let me know if it’s ever safe to return.
I think it would help shape our common perception if these incidents were sistematically collected (anonymized if necessary) and stored somewhere for people to look at. I’ve really never witnessed episodes of discrimination taking place in this forum, github or on matrix, but you and others are always telling that there are plenty of them.
And I’m not trying to say you’re all lying, honestly, I want to understand if my perception is really off or whether I haven’t being paying enough attention to notice.
We don’t want to put our experiences up for public debate so you can play devil’s advocate about whether it was “really meant as discrimination”.
Hello everyone,
I’d like to take a moment to clarify my previous comment in this thread. First and foremost, please know that I did not intend to dismiss any issues that others might face within this community. I am aware that, as with any large, diverse community, there are challenges and areas where members experience difficulties that I may not be personally familiar with.
To any individuals who felt that my words minimised their experiences, I sincerely apologise. My goal was to be considerate and thorough, crafting each word and weighing every sentence carefully to avoid causing any harm. Despite this, it seems I failed, and for that, I deeply regret any unintended hurt my words may have caused. I am genuinely saddened to learn that another contributor has left the community. This was never my intention, and I regret that my words may have contributed to this outcome.
After a day of reflection, private discussions here and there and initially deciding not to re-engage in this thread, I felt it was important to return and provide clarification. In hindsight, sharing my personal experiences might not have been the best approach in this particular context, especially as I haven’t personally encountered the issues being discussed here. This gap in direct experience may have led to my comment being perceived as detached from the core of the conversation.
One point that I also wanted to bring attention to is that some messages in this thread have been flagged, even when they were attempts to understand the situation better. It’s possible some community members are genuinely unaware of the issues and the surrounding nuances. Please don’t be mean with them, it is totally fine to not understand something we never encountered. I’m pretty sure there’s plenty of people having good will that could be allies once they have all the keys to understand. Perhaps a collective resource, a place where we can list common concerns and explanations, but also a guide on how to behave in case of a similar problem, could benefit the community at large, offering context and insight without detracting from the ongoing discussion. Such a resource could serve as a helpful guide for others who want to engage more thoughtfully.
Hope no hard feelings here, let’s move on with ideas and concrete actions.
I would like to clarify something I said earlier, since I don’t think it was received very well.
I meant this very literally: this is legitimately my first time hearing this. Before I posted, I even searched for the terms “discrimination” and “discriminate” to see if maybe I just missed a more in-depth discussion at some point, but I couldn’t really find anything, except a vague reference earlier this year. It’s also just weird, because I can’t even fathom why or even how someone would do this anyways, but that’s beside the point. My window into the NixOS community is small: I’m a low-throughput Nixpkgs maintainer and I intermittently participate on the Discourse forums. I am not on Matrix, I don’t go to the events, and I don’t participate in development of Nix itself, infra or other projects, so it’s not really that surprising if things happen and I don’t see them. Of course, I hope these incidents are outliers and not recurring issues. I’m definitely surprised, given that most of my experiences with other NixOS community members has left me with an overwhelmingly positive impression.
More to the point of this thread… I agree strongly with this sentiment:
I basically asked if anyone knew of any tech communities that met the criteria for (A) and the only specific community that came up was the Python community… which, at least according to the JetBrains survey, appears to have a worse gender distribution than the NixOS project already has.
I’m not suggesting that this means outreach is pointless or that we shouldn’t do it, but we’re in a thread spawned by discontent with the gender distribution metrics, and being realistic I think we can’t expect that even fairly extensive outreach efforts will hugely offset the gap. I will repeat again that I am not suggesting this is a reason to not go fund and do outreach, we should, but unfortunately unless we can have a mindset shift about how to view the survey results we’re doomed to have this thread again every year.
I can’t force people to acknowledge this point, but I hope it will be considered. Otherwise, I’m just not sure what we’re supposed to do to move past these threads.