Re: Guix (and Guile's) promise, and how to (hopefully) get there

[paul <goodoldpaul@autistici.org>]

Hi Ekaitz,

On 10/27/24 11:47, Ekaitz Zarraga wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On 2024-10-27 11:00, indieterminacy wrote:
> > I think a useful measurement of any community is the diversity 
> within it.
>
> I do think we are a pretty diverse group.
>
> But it all comes to what you consider diverse. Some people brought 
> this conversation during the Guix Days, probably ignoring the fact 
> that we had people coming from all over the world. I don't know what 
> was their definition of diversity at that moment.
I can't talk for the people you mention, but usually by diversity one 
means social diversity, it meansco-existence of different social groups 
within a given setting.
> On the other hand, we have something in common, so it's really hard to 
> be diverse in the broad sense. Should we include people that like 
> proprietary software, too? Those are also people, and I'm sure they 
> would feel uncomfortable between us.
For sure they would, but "proprietary software user" is not a social 
group, so they would not be meaningful in a measure of  the Guix project 
social diversity.
>
> This is not to say we shouldn't try to make things better and more 
> welcoming, of course we should. But I don't think "diversity" actually 
> means that much as a measure because I don't think it's an absolute 
> concept and I think it's very easy to misunderstand.

I am not an expert but there are many social scientist that are, for 
sure for them social diversity is a pretty clear concept since they 
sometimes have to measure it for their research work.

While for sure all your points about care, overwork and burnout are 
valid, I believe the fundamental problem to be of governance. To make 
Guix better software (there is scientific consensus that diverse 
communities have better governance, it is easy to find), we should find 
out more about how to measure social diversity and take concrete actions 
towards making the Guix community a more diverse one.

At last, image is fundamental otherwise big corporations wouldn't spend 
so much to try to do whatever-washing, getting distance between us and 
GNU/FSF would concretely help very much with diversity.

Thank you all in the Guix community for your awesome work so far,


giacomo