On 2 March 2016 at 05:44, R. David Murray rdmurray@bitdance.com wrote:
On Tue, 01 Mar 2016 19:00:21 +0000, Brett Cannon brett@python.org wrote:
Now obviously I could be totally wrong and this isn't an actual barrier for getting women or ethnic minorities to participate in Python's development.
Yeah, there's no way to know, as far as I can see. But I think our *being* welcoming is way, *way* more important than our *saying* we are welcoming.
Words that weren't backed up by behaviour would be false advertising, and hence far more problematic than silence or an explicit statement that an environment is deliberately adversarial.
However, it also isn't reasonable for open source projects to expect potential contributors to invest weeks or months in assessing their likely treatment if they speak up on a mailing list or submit a new patch - it turns out that having the kind of spare time needed to speculatively invest in following a community for long enough to make that kind of judgement for ourselves is a rare luxury.
That's where written behavioural commitments can help - as long as they accurately reflect the way that community members actually strive to conduct themselves, than it helps newcomers better assess "Am I likely to feel comfortable here?".
Regards, Nick.