I wish that we had a proven solution for that kind of issue in online communities in general. It's quite disappointing. Thanks for forwarding that post. Pine On Oct 7, 2015 6:44 AM, "Jason Radford" <jsradford(a)uchicago.edu> wrote: > > I think folks here will understand this story. > > http://sarah.thesharps.us/2015/10/05/closing-a-door/

On Wed, Oct 7, 2015 at 12:44 PM, rupert THURNER <rupert.thurner(a)gmail.com> wrote: She didn't try to change Linus Torvalds. She left. The question in every community is really quite simple when we talk about these things; If we want to let people be personally confrontational, unwelcoming or abusive because we want to let people who they are, then we lose people who have no patience or desire to be abused in their capacity as volunteers. I think what Linus Torvalds is missing is empathy to others who aren't like *him* (ironically), but he's far from being the only one in the field to apparently lack that, especially in these type of discussions.

On Wed, Oct 7, 2015 at 3:21 PM, WereSpielChequers <werespielchequers(a)gmail.com> wrote: Yes. She didn't try to change Linus, she tried to change the community. There's a difference. A person can be whoever they want to be, but in the context of the community, there could be basic rules of thumb that guides what the community feels should be basic decency.

>> On Wed, Oct 7, 2015 at 12:44 PM, rupert THURNER >> <rupert.thurner(a)gmail.com> wrote: >>> to let wikipedia NPOV also have a word, here what linus torvalds >>> thought about it two years ago: >>> http://marc.info/?l=linux-kernel&m=137392506516022&w=2 >>> in a summary, torvalds argues that sarah sharp should accept that >>> people are different and act different, she should not try to change >>> linus torvalds. >> >>> > On Oct 7, 2015 6:44 AM, "Jason Radford" <jsradford(a)uchicago.edu> >>> > wrote: >>> >> >>> >> I think folks here will understand this story. >>> >> >>> >> http://sarah.thesharps.us/2015/10/05/closing-a-door/

moriel, i do not agree to the abstraction you introduce here. a I am simplifying the bottom line, because the bottom line is fairly simple. When a group of individuals form a community, they are no longer completely individuals; they have set for themselves a social contract that binds them. We can discuss the minutia of the social contract forever, of course, as these arguments went for ages, from John Locke's extensive individual liberties, to Hobbes' absolute authoritative rule, to Jean Jack Rousseau's general will -- but that still leaves the conclusion the same: What type of community do we *want* to have? I find it somewhat ironic that we are arguing for respecting an almost absolute individual rights and liberties of people in the community who are (sometimes self-professed) assholes and bully others, but we neglect the individual rights and liberties of the people who are being bullied. The entire point of having a *community* (rather than a disconnected grouping of individuals) is to find the balance to give the liberties to its members not on the expense of other members' liberties. And yet, it seems that in the arguments that are raised, the "sides" keep being presented as the extreme choices, as if no other middle ground is available. That is false, and we don't have to read historical philosophical treatises to see that. The option is not to either "have liberty" or "be oppressed". That is a strawman representation of our options. There are many more options, which many governments and societies around the world adapt -- some more successfully than others -- without crushing the individual rights of people who don't seem to care about the individual rights of others. Sarah Sharp's leaving Linux' community is not about Linus Torvalds' individual rights to be an asshole. He can continue being an asshole all he wants, and he, I assume, knows the pros and cons of being an asshole in his personal life. It's his right, and he deserves to make that personal choice. The community of people who gathered for a shared purpose, however, needs to make a conscious, collective decision about the type of community they care to have. That is the point of having a community in the first place. It is a very simple give and take, a simple mathematical consideration: You get one thing on the expense of another, such is life. *Which is why in life, most often, we look for middle ground rather than extremes.* If the social contract the community agrees on implicitly or explicitly results in making certain sub-groups marginalized, bullied and feel unwelcome, then these groups will not stay as part of that community. If the community thinks this is a correct price to pay for absolute liberties, then all the John Locke for it. If, however, we recognize that this price is too steep -- and that the "corrective step" of "don't be a jerk to others" is acceptable -- then the community should demonstrate it in its social contract and find the balance between oppressing the bullies and supporting the bullied. I don't see what's so complicated in this concept, really. We're just making it complicated by concentrating on the small details. So I will repeat my paragraph from my first email, the one that makes everything really really simple: "If people don't think that having an abusive community is a problem, then they should understand they are *losing* the people they are abusing, and keeping the people who are abusing others. That means that we are not keeping the good contributors and weeding out the lazy/bad contributors -- it means we're keeping the jerks, whether they're effective contributors or not, and weeding out the ones who give up and don't want to be abused, whether they're awesome or not." -- No trees were harmed in the creation of this post. But billions of electrons, photons, and electromagnetic waves were terribly inconvenienced during its transmission! _______________________________________________ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap(a)lists.wikimedia.org To manage your subscription preferences, including unsubscribing, please visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap

FWIW, some of us attending WCONUSA are hoping to have an unconference session about incentivizing desirable user behaviors on ENWP, and I imagine that some portions of that discussion will be extensible to other habitats in the Wikimedia ecosystem. If anyone in this conversation online would like to join us at the unconference, please do. Pine _______________________________________________ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap(a)lists.wikimedia.org To manage your subscription preferences, including unsubscribing, please visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap

Maybe! Those of us who are planning to help with recording sessions cam discuss that with the organizing team once we are all in the same building. Pine On Oct 8, 2015 1:11 PM, "Moriel Schottlender" <moriel(a)gmail.com> wrote:

Sarah did actually have some great suggestions on how to do things better: http://sarah.thesharps.us/2015/10/06/what-makes-a-good-community/ -Leigh On Wed, Oct 7, 2015 at 3:58 PM, Pine W <wiki.pine(a)gmail.com> wrote: -- Leigh Honeywell http://hypatia.ca @hypatiadotca _______________________________________________ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap(a)lists.wikimedia.org To manage your subscription preferences, including unsubscribing, please visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap

encyclopedias) is a social process, and basic civility goes a long way towards lubricating social processes. >I also don't buy Linus's argument that being professional is being fake. No one is asking Linus to wear a suit and tie and use marketing >buzzwords. They're just asking him to chill out and not be an asshole. Of course he's welcome to act out his "normal urges", as he puts >it, but I don't think he's doing any favors for the cultural health of the free software movement. I really wonder if we’re looking at this backward. It almost sounds from your interpretation that Linus (whom in fairness I have never met or interacted with, not least because I’m not a Linux groupie, so I can’t speak to the truth of this) seems to have founded an open-source software community as a place for people, uh, “on spectrum” to hang out online and work together on something in their preferred way, rather than had the idea for Linux and then, well, all these people just happened to gravitate to it.