[vaurora]

OP here. To all the people flustered that I'm calling "listening politely" and "respecting people" feminist acts, I'll point out that, at the time, the only place you could reasonably expect that behavior in the Linux community was... a feminist collective, LinuxChix.

To this day, women in $COMPUTER_THING groups tend to be overrun by men searching for a civil place to have a technical conversation. It happened with the #debian-women IRC channel too. Just today, another man told me how volunteering for Women Who Code taught him to be more welcoming to newcomers in his own open source project. And have you seen the stickers on Guido Van Rossum's laptop?

So, yeah, it's possible to have these values without identifying as feminist, but in open source software today, explicitly feminist communities are usually the only ones that put these values into practice.

[asveikau]

Regardless of any gender discussion, kudos for the atime hack. It's so much easier to say atime is a dumb feature or that apps relying on it are stupid. But you found a great compromise.

[pXMzR2A]

> Regardless of any gender discussion

The gender discussion (the insights it brought to the table) was central to the development of relative atime says the OP.

[asveikau]

I don't care to get into that, it is a more complex subject than a single work like OP's article or the entirety of this thread can do justice towards. I am merely sayng a good hack is a good hack and discussing it on its merits.

[pXMzR2A]

> discussing it on its merits

Again, the OP makes it clear that taking seriously some of the basic tenets of feminism was operational in realizing the code. So, it is one of the merits. Otherwise, arguing that

> I am merely sayng a good hack is a good hack

and refusing, against your own argument, the merits of the code, is just a simplistic attempt to de-legitimize feminism as if it were a topic unworthy of serious debate. That, in turn, is just a redo of the very behavior (of not taking people and their stories seriously) that the OP (and the OP over at G+) was talking about in relation to the failures of the open source communities.

[asveikau]

> is just a simplistic attempt to de-legitimize feminism

Please refrain from making assumptions about my motives. You don't know where I stand on this issue, I merely said it was complex and I was not attempting to solve it in a single comment.

I just wanted to comment on the idea itself and personally congratulate the author. I chose to not make your preferred topic the focus of my comment. I think you can live with that without making this kind of assumption about me, or making personal attacks.

[lotsofmangos]

I'd say the biggest success story so far in making a linux community that listens politely and respects people has been the Ubuntu project and I didn't think that was explicitly feminist. I also think it has flaws in how it implements policy sometimes, but it is so big I would be surprised if it never had any issues and I think in general it has changed the culture of linux community for the better.

[hypatiadotca]

Some of us, many of whom are involved in the Ubuntu Women project, spent the better part of a decade working to make Ubuntu that way. I'm glad our work paid off :)

[lotsofmangos]

You've done it pretty well, thanks for making my life easier.

[ObviousScience]

Your comment suggests a strong confounding factor: feminist communities are likely to be both smaller and more focused on user conduct than technical communities at large.

Without controlling for these factors, attaching the behaviors you do to "feminism" is nothing but saying "good things are done by those who agree with me, and bad things are done by those /others/".

Your argument does nothing to explain why you think this happens, and simply admits you're appropriating them without knowing why the correlation exists in communities.

Classic propaganda.

Ed:

I'm glad I've been downvoted and apologized for because I raised a methodological issue with trying to ascribe behaviors to a community, instead of actually showing me where she discussed why she doesn't think it's either of the (relatively well known) effects I asked about. I couldn't find anywhere she addressed this topic, but I'm entirely open to being corrected.

Here's the wikipedia article on the fallacy I'm claiming is being committed here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_caus...

Ed 2:

My latin is terrible these days, lol

[hashbanged]

> feminist communities are likely to be both smaller and more focused on user conduct than technical communities at large

Is Python small? I'm sure there were other small linux communities (the term seems almost redundant) who were much less welcoming to women.

I don't know what to say to convince you that open source communities are traditionally hyper male and sexist. It's not so hard to imagine that you might get more contributions from women in an explicitly women friendly space within a larger women unfriendly (to say the least) community.

Here's some reading, I encourage you to read it if you think I'm wrong.

http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/4291/33...

[ObviousScience]

> Also, these communities’ openness means that a minority of difficult members (including, for example, a sincere misogynist or an insincere troll) can disproportionately affect the tone and dynamics of interactions. Finally, the ideology and rhetoric of freedom and openness can then be used to (a) suppress concerns by labeling them as “censorship” and, to (b) rationalize low female participation as simply a matter of women’s choice.

> I argue that some otherwise commendable features of the free culture movement also contribute to the gender gap. That is, the geek stereotype and discursive style can be unappealing, open communities are especially susceptible to difficult people, and the ideas of freedom and openness can be used to dismiss concerns and rationalize the gender gap as a matter of preference and choice.

I'm making a second reply purely to point out that the article you cited talked about confounding influences as being one of the main sources of the problem, while you attacked my comment for talking about confounding influences being part of the solution.

That seems absolutely insane, and suggests you didn't actually respond to my comment on the merits, but rather, out of anger someone didn't agree with you.

[ObviousScience]

> It's not so hard to imagine that you might get more contributions from women in an explicitly women friendly space within a larger women unfriendly (to say the least) community.

No one (at least, not me) was talking about this.

What I said is that ascribing certain common behaviors to being a result of being feminist or being part of a feminist community without examining other causes is such a common fallacy is has a Latin name and wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_caus...

It's also a classic propaganda maneuver.

Ed:

Been too long since school, can't Latin on the fly.

[chipsy]

OP provided evidence from personal experience: "In these communities, I observed this." You speculated about both qualities of feminist communities and qualities of user group size and composition, and then used that to drive the premise of your argument. That is unsound criticism.

[ObviousScience]

Hardly.

That in a community you experience something doesn't necessarily imply that it's related to the core ideology of the group being different - there often are other factors which cause the change and would independent of that core ideology. "With this, therefore because of this" is such a common fallacy, it has a name in Latin: cum hoc ergo propter hoc. [1]

Further, my experience with online communities, which dates over a decade - and the experiences of my friends managing both large and small internet communities - implies that there are two correlations: a larger group will tend to have more problematic actors, who tend to be overrepresented in the number of comments, and that a group which focuses more on the behavior of members will tend to have better behaving members (if only because they ban the others).

Without controlling for two well known internet community effects, arguing that your community is somehow special is the height of improper reasoning.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_caus...

Ed: Terrible Latin.

[richmarr]

> my experience with online communities, > which dates over a decade

Translation: "I am over twenty"

Seriously though, I love logic too, but it doesn't always make you right. Sometimes it makes you that guy that stops everyone making progress. I've been that guy before, and I've fired that guy before.

[ObviousScience]

Translation: I don't approach very serious questions with the best tools to come to the correct answer, I just go with whatever feels good to me so I can be seen Doing Something!(tm) even if it ends up not helping, and I'll punish or censor anyone who disagrees with me!

Seriously, I don't understand this view when taken in response to serious topics: aren't sexism and the challenges women face in technology topics serious enough that they deserve us at our best, not us at our most base and animalistic? aren't serious topics the ones we should most realize we're emotional beings and strive to approach with rationality, knowing that they're complex and full of correlations caused by confounding variables, which are known to be deceptive to our instincts and intuitions? aren't serious topics the ones we should realize our own propensity to shout down dissent for less-than-good reasons, and instead strive to discuss as mature individuals our different experiences and views with each other?

Social topics are large, complex, and full of all kinds of confounding variables that make sussing out the true cause of things a complex task. That you think now is the time we should abandon the tools we invented just to do that - like questioning if a correlation is actually causal or not - is just kind of weird to me.

I'm open to being wrong, but so far, no one has taken the time to point out what they think I'm wrong about here (it would have just been a quick cite if she'd address that point!), and instead have attacked me personally for asking a methodological question about a sensitive topic.

So I'll be blunt: I don't think you actually care about women, sexism, or making things better. I think you just want to feel good about it, about Doing Something!(tm), rather than having to deal with the real work of sorting out a complex social issue.

That's all I hear from you when you say "Let's not be logical here, let's just go with what I feel is right", that you don't care enough about the topic to even be concerned if you're right or not.

[richmarr]

The only logical approach is to demand rigor in situations that demand it. For me this is not one of those situations, because the cost (to me) of the OP being mistaken in her conclusions or actions is zero, as it should be to you. So we logically we should support her because if she's right we all benefit.

For some reason something about the OP's position has made you angry and defensive, as demonstrated by the lengthy replies you've made to a number of people, in my case containing some quite personal comments. Up to you, but I'd suggest taking some time to explore why that is.

[LyndsySimon]

I believe your original post might have been taken differently had you omitted the last line:

> Classic propaganda

[knowtheory]

This is only true if OP's arguments have no content and their qualities are attributed solely to a particular group.

Given that OP's argument does have content that we can evaluate your argument is irrelevant.

So that propaganda thing is just jumping to conclusions.

[smtddr]

First, Let me just apologize for commentors like ObviousScience[1].

Second, Guido's laptop for those that don't wanna search for it right now - https://adainitiative.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/fword_g...

Third, you definitely have an uphill[2] battle but there are those of us who get the point you're making.

1. http://i.imgur.com/6FOoDLA.png

2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8411699

[gaandmaraa]

First, it's incredibly patronizing to apologize on behalf of another commentator without first engaging with the commentator directly. Not detailing what exactly you disagree with doesn't enhance your argument and is frankly, a bit of a cop-out.

Second, thanks for the link, Guido's just an all-round awesome guy!

Third, to reproduce an excerpt from the other HN discussion you linked (as per your comment): >> _The whole tech scene needs to collectively take a sensitivity training course to regain its humanity._

That's a pretty heavy statement. How about the fact that the OP has mentioned at least on 3 different occasions in the article that she was taking the feminist "AKA" human-centered approach to solving the problem. Many would read and be left with the impression that the OP is somehow under the impression that non-feminist approaches are clearly not human-centric enough. There's far too much convenient conflation weaved in there, and if we're making a huge brouhaha about being politically correct, I would you encourage yourself and the OP to take the sensitivity training before brandishing such accusatory remarks on the community that doesn't necessarily identify itself as feminist.

[pXMzR2A]

> the impression that the OP is somehow under the impression that non-feminist approaches are clearly not human-centric enough.

Feminism is well-founded on the premise that personal experiences matter ("personal is political"). That is what the OP is refering to in that statement.

> politically correct

Political correctness (a symlink to hypocricy) has nothing to do with this. OP is telling the story of how feminism's teachings on how one should pay specific and careful attention to individual stories of their experiences pays off significantly in the long run for social change.

Almost no other critical political approach pays more attention to personal experience than feminism. The ones that do borrow their attentiveness from feminism. Henceforth, rather than being offended for some reason for OP's comments on feminism, I'd suggest you check out feminist approaches to methodology.