Model View Culture

> Think about the open source software movement (OSS). One crucial perspective that the OSS shares with D&I is that both view discrimination as an impediment to progress. OSS licenses include several non-discrimination clauses (economic, field of endeavor, other restrictions). The licenses go to great lengths to ensure the technology is available to everyone.

While licenses may have clauses that deal with some kinds of discrimination, OSS communities are not inclusive and may actually be outright hostile to groups of people. The last Model View Culture had an article about this [1]. Suffice it to say that there is no common community behavior that appears in all OSS groups and what is exceptable in one group vs. another varies quite a bit.

> Or is it the open air bazaar, with all kinds of people talking (softly or loudly) in a place known for public discourse. A place where anyone can walk by and join in and become part of what's going on?

Well this come back to the very common myth of meritocracy in tech, that tech only looks at merit and thus avoids discrimination, personal and institutional. However, meritocracy in tech often simply functions as a way for people to avoid talking about bias or pretending like bias doesn't exist. Moreover, what it means to look for merit is often defined as those statuses and symbols that are comfortable to the dominant group of people in tech, white men of middle or higher class backgrounds.

> So this isn't really about embracing D&I.…

it's unethical.

I love Android because it's open and am happy that Google kept it that way... to an extent. Some of the things they do are backhanded. For example, there's a strong campaign to condition users to only trust Google for apps. Downloading any third party APK from Chrome brings up a scary warning: https://v5j7s7h5.ssl.hwcdn.net/v2/mkstatic/chrome-warning.png/w:480/h:853/image.png
If you do a mobile search for porn apps, half the screen is taken up by anti-porn apps available in Play Store. They campaign that Play is the only legitimate and safe source, but malicious apps find their way in Play too. Instead of lumping all third party sources as "Unknown" and potentially dangerous, there ought to be a way for third parties to earn "Known" status and verified as a trusted source. But I doubt we'll ever get that fair treatment.

It's not just Google though, obviously. These tech giants have the opportunity and thus responsibility to make a positive difference here. Instead, by blocking one of our most basic human desires, they often chose to devolve and perpetuate the war on sex.

I daydream that, one day, tech giants like Google, Amazon, or Yahoo, or VCs and banks will say, “Let’s open our doors to SexTech companies we can trust.” We try to operate everyday as if this is a possibility, because one day I hope it will be.

If you have time to spare, I go into a lot of it here https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/sextech-startups-in-a-hostile-business-world
There's…

Quoting from an article by her on meritocracy[1]:

> In the Ruby world, we insist that “Matz Is Nice And So We Are Nice,” ignoring the sexist statements he has made with regard to diversity outreach efforts. We write off Linus Torvalds’ dismissal of diversity as an “unimportant detail” and justify it based on the utility of his creations. But why is it that we can proudly refuse to use software created by corporations whose often aggressive business policies we disagree with, but continue to adopt software written by sexists, racists, homophobes, transphobes?

I feel that's pretty close to directly calling Matz a sexist. Later she proposes a Code of Conduct for Ruby so that there's a robust process for punishing sexism[2]. As far as I understand, Matz' tweet would have counted as an offence.

Also, while her Contributor Covenant seems like it strives to make GitHub interactions more civilised, Caroline has a public Twitter account on which she screenshots people who disagree with her for her followers to sneer at (current, harmless example: [3]). Inexplicably (to me), this behaviour is fine by the logic of the CC. I'd say it's the highway to emotional escalation.

Nothing of this invalidates her viewpoints, but her approach of working for change is more "take no prisoners" than "low friction".

[1] https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/the-dehumanizing-myth-of-the-meritocracy
[2] https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/12004
[3]…

The reason for this is that in many circumstances, male social value is determined disproportionately by the approval/disapproval of women. So when a woman turns a man down in this way, she not only rejects him for sex, but also reduces his social value.

Any "fix" for this will drastically reduce women's social power.

It's far from clear that women in general want this to happen. One complaint I've heard from a number of women about tech environments directly relates to this; a social butterfly who organizes parties and hackathons has lower status than the fat neckbeard who fixed all the performance problems.

In fact, activists regularly moan about this: https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/acknowledging-non-coding-contributions https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/how-tech-devalues-social-media-workers

Not knowing much about him, let's throw a bunch of things at the wall and see what sticks:

- https://model-view-culture.myshopify.com/products/your-startup-is-broken

- https://modelviewculture.com/

- Something by Don Reinertsen, maybe The Principles of Product Development Flow, maybe something else.

- Valve Employee Handbook http://www.valvesoftware.com/company/Valve_Handbook_LowRes.pdf

- http://thinkrelevance.com/how-we-work

- Ries, The Lean Startup

All of these sources hide lots of dysfunction, so as always take them with a grain of salt. Take Ricardo Semler's fun books. In one of his Harvard Business School lectures, he mentioned how his books are artificially optimistic, because publishers want to sell more books.

I think this is a great idea. While I think the execution could be improved (maybe a person wants to see an different therapist, or one outside the office), but attempting to remove the stigma surrounding mental health, and giving low friction access is huge. There is also the acknowledgement of the fact that most people aren't perfect, and nearly everyone could benefit from some sort of counseling. If everyone at your company is in perfect mental health you're either incredibly lucky, or kidding yourself.

I think Shanley Kane put it best[1]: "People are broken, and people work at companies."

[1] https://modelviewculture.com/news/the-eternal-and-toxic-optimism-of-startup-advice