Re: Code Of Conduct

[Liam R E Quin <liam holoweb net>]

On Thu, 2006-06-01 at 13:23 +0200, Anne Østergaard wrote:
[...]
> I have personally had the feeling over the past couple of years that the
> general atmosphere in the GNOME community has hardened.
Although I am not sure what you mean by hardened here, it doesn't
sound good.

> I fully agree with Bill and others here and I think we have to establish
> a gender action plan within GNOME, Ubuntu etc.

A non-discrimination policy would be a useful thing to do.

The city of Toronto has a fairly good one, devised in conjunction
with a large number of minority groups over a long period:
http://www.toronto.ca/grants/pdf/declaration_non_discrimination_policy.pdf

It was printed on a huge multilingual poster (including Braille) and
distributed widely.

Creation or adoption of such a policy is not the same as saying
that there is discrimination, of course -- it is saying that
discrimination isn't OK.

Gnome has done ground-breaking work on accessibility, on
internationalisation, and on usability.  This work ought to
be sending a strong message that diversity is welcomed.

Beyond that I am not sure how to get more women involved.  One
difficulty is cultural in many parts of the world, unfortunately:
girls are often trained to turn to boys when something needs fixing.

To get back on topic of the original thread, I'd rather see some
non-discrimination non-violence policies in place and then a
code of conduct would consist of "follow the guidelines".

Liam

-- 
Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/
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