NixOS Foundation board announcement: Moderation concerns

Meta Moderation
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Edit: having to make corrections. Speech to text isn’t capturing correctly.

I’m interested in how that looks though. We are past the age of institutional discrimination, what applies to the majority inherently applies to minorities today.

I am saying this as a minority who appreciates the paths that lead to my equality and having a voice that is equally heard as others.

Fist point I should make, this forum’s default is an anonymous status, so no one knows that you’re a minority unless you call attention to it, which you do have the right do. But how could they otherwise know to discriminate?
You have the right to be who you are and not be discriminated against which I agree.

I’m still not understanding how the current CoC which applies to everyone doesn’t help protect everyone currently. And why they need to specifically call out protections for minorities? I’m just not sure how the current CoC doesn’t do that already while still being applied to everyone equally.

So I need to understand personally what this protection looks like? How is it being applied?.

Respect is one a pillar of the CoC, so what is being added on top of that that specifically protects minorities. Honestly, it might just be semantics that is throwing people off. I think a clear definition of what it looks like what it means would go pretty far to calming people down, but so far everything has been vague.

And I’m saying this as someone who is experienced potential abuse of a “Protected Class” in the Enterprise world. Specifically when it comes to a dissenting opinion. I know this is anecdotal and I hate that I might be helping prejudiced people, but since I’ve seen it, I have to mention that some “protected classes” think that the only reason why you’re questioning or pushing back on their opinion is because they are a protected class, which honestly mostly isn’t true, just don’t like the idea.

So I definitely feel like we should be a “safe space”. It should be known that this is a safe space and I don’t want to bang the drum on the same point, but I think people are getting lost in the semantics of the language specifically because what’s inherently “protecting minorities” means we’re doing something extra. What extra is being done that the current CoC doesn’t already cover.

I think that would go a long way in helping people how it affects everyone in the community. Again, I’m saying this as a minority myself who understand definitely pre-1960s. It was important because literally discrimination was legal but we’re post-legal discrimination so I’m just trying to understand what protections looks like in today’s world.

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Jon did post a thread. I can’t find it anymore. I did also find it horrendous, as I could easily see how some of our community members would obviously take it as a direct attack against them, and that they would feel “attacked because they are members of a minority”.

And this attack was perpetrated by a powerful person from the within community: the current Release Manager.

This post was very calm and was only asking one simple question. Yet, it was impossible not to see how a powerful direct attack against minorities it was. Maybe this question could be asked, but obviously not in this way, at this time, and by this person. And he did plead guilty.

@nixnewb: you are asking if “anyone in these forum” “writtien anything against a minority” (sic). I have an answer for you: yes, I think at the very least Jon, in that post. But please ask your questions in a more civilized way: I find your rant unwelcoming, and therefore unwelcome, especially in post 37.

Profile - jonringer - NixOS Discourse doesn’t list it though, so I guess it was deleted. And my memory is not perfect: I mostly recall my interpretation and my feelings.

dedguy21 ? I think he state that, given his experience as member of a minority, he doesn’t see how one could feel threaten.

Yet, we have plenty of evidence of other nix community members from minorities stating they felt attacked, especially since some of those left our community, loudly or not, either for Aux or for plain nothing.

(I’m terrified of this “plain nothing”. How could one abandon all the technical promises of beloved Nix ? This is still what eg. Xe is doing, as they try to migrate to Ansible.)

So let’s use logic here: some people don’t feel attacked, and some other people do feel attacked. Can we deny that it is possible to feel attacked ? I don’t think so. Does anyone stating they don’t feel attacked change anything ? I don’t think so.

I also think we want this community not be shattered: “The community is more important than the product”. For this, I think we should ensure our members will not feel attacked.

Btw, claiming this community is safe while some of its member expressed they don’t feel safe imply denying them their own feelings. Which is attacking them even more, and reinforcing their unsafe feeling, so not helping.

I think we should have a moderation team overlooking this to block attacks. And I think our current moderation team is doing what they can, but that their task is way too huge.

I’m not saying they are perfect (they are humans, what do you expect ? Who ever said they were perfect ?), not saying they couldn’t do better, but I think we should be very thankful for their huge work and dedication, and try to help them.

I am not sure about that, and can provide this as a list of counter-examples to consider: Capital punishment for homosexuality - Wikipedia

I guess this is because minorities asked for specific protection against some class of attacks they regularly take. Those class of attacks may not be obvious for everyone until enough people get educated on some specific points. Therefore, I think we just have to make them clear and known by writing them at the right place.

In a more general way, why do we even write a CoC ? Because there are individuals who are not able to properly be respectful with all other members of the community. Maybe because they are new, and/or they don’t know all represented culture / orientation / background / etc well enough, so it can be hard not to offend anyone. Specific protection rules can help with that, by providing hints to avoid most common wrong scenarii, and be used as reference when someone doesn’t understand their wrong doing.

I agree that once we will have observed a fair amount of time without any offense against one of those “specific” rules, we might be able to remove it, and I will be very happy as it will signal the world would be a better place with more tolerant and more educated humans.

I agree this is something that must be considered. But I do not think this is a good enough reason to deny protection to those who ask. And we are talking about protection, not immunity.

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On the Nixos Homepage, there are no statements reflecting any of the issues which are presently convulsing the community and causing great internecine schism.

Could somebody within Nixos please define the corporate morality, and then place it on the homepage in black & white?

Surely in an open source project there will be millions of disparate people and myriad different worldviews. People just have to respect each other, and get on with things. We are here for the
technology, surely; beers and bonhomie are a bonus.

If the enterprise is in thrall to some greater entity, (I have gleaned that there is some kind of MIC controlling hand), then perhaps also a statement regarding the sponsors on the homepage.

Or perhaps a denial:

e.g.
“Nixos does not endorse the use of its software in AI systems purposed for bombing civilians”

(This is purely exemplary - the statement would simply reflect the actual corporate moral stance)

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Hi and I suppose welcome to the community, since you registered only about three months ago.

I’ve been active for about 5 years now, and these days I derive all of my income from working on the Nix ecosystem. While from the very beginning I wished for such clear collective statements on many issues, the reality is that this is not how the community works. In my view, the cohesion and availability required for timely statements that would have far-reaching consequences on outward perception and community dynamics is not there. This is mainly a group of volunteers, very few of us happen to get paid to contribute, but we’re anything but a corporation. The community has grown organically over 20 years, without explicit leadership. We currently don’t have efficient or even structured processes to reach consensus on sensitive issues, let alone binding agreements.

This is in fact one major reason why we published the message this thread refers to. In my opinion it’s the most important, most collective, and most timely ever — and still comes way too late and leaves many questions open. Someone said: a lot of thunks are being forced these days, which have been long overdue.

That said, I have high hopes we will grow a fair bit of organisational maturity in the next months, which I think is unavoidable for a community of that size (~100 closely involved, ~800 active contributors, supposedly ~5 000 power users, likely > 15 000 users) to even survive. But it’s a bit much to ask what amounts to “a bunch of people” to act like what you may expect from a company.

Please be patient. And if that’s too boring, try to help solving the problems you find most important. Asking or demanding won’t help, already in principle: you can’t make anyone do anything, and even whoever agrees with you still needs the time take care of the issue. Ideally that would just be you yourself. :slightly_smiling_face:

https://nix.dev/contributing/how-to-contribute

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Thank you for the considered reply Frickler.

n.b. I meant corporate in the sense of “a collective body of people”.

It seems like Nix has carved its path like a river.
It all seems good to me, because as a recent adopter,
I am blessed with the most incredible piece of software
and it is a game-changer. (& I am sure for many, a life-changer).

Like you say, now is the time shore things up a bit. Define things a
bit less loosely.

Why not identify as many of these Nixos users as you can & send out a questionnaire to determine their level of Nix expertise.
Then badge them in the community, you say would be an Alpha, me a Delta or whatever.

Then find out what the concerns of the community are - obviously
someone like yourself who is steeped in Nix and its technical and corporate ecosystem, will have a lot more to say than myself.

Once the agendas can be determined, then they can be thrashed out.
Plebiscites etc. People voting & inputting according to their skill set obviously.

Regarding abusive behaviour and bullying, I am shocked that this
has reared its ugly head in this community, especially given that
most, if not virtually all, of our interactions are not even physical.
The fact that this is being debated is really sad. What someone does at the weekend is irrelevant to me in this context. Have they built a
flake that I can use? Yes. Fantastic. Thank you. Move on.

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