[Ubuntu-US-CA] Flaw #1

[David Fox]

On Thu, Sep 24, 2009 at 4:01 AM, Mark Terranova <mark at gidgetkitchen.org> wrote:

> Since our active membership does not reflect our state's diverse
> population; we can only bring a limited perspective to the table.
> Again - just a small temporary roadbump.

I am really puzzled about that statement, for two reasons:

1) Involvement in this industry, whether that be free software and its
surrounding community advocacy, is probably not going to mirror the
generalized makeup of the overall community (state of California)
simply because of the technical nature. Of course, I could be wrong
about that.

2) It's not relevant. At least I don't think it is. After all, simply
because of the nature of mailing lists, the Internet in general, we
can have the most color- and race-blind community as a whole, simply
because all you know (unless you physically meet the people) is their
name and you can only really judge them by the quality of their posts
(analogous to MLK asking people to judge based on the content of their
character). Here, on the Internet and on mailing lists, all we can
base our assumptions on is how well the person in question
communicates, gets his/her point across, and make a decision whether
one can accept or reject that position.

Debian-user (and ubuntu-users too) have representation from most
countries in the world (at least those that have a decent connection)
and there's active participation from people all over the world. So
why shouldn't a community LoCo be any different,.except for the
limited geographic scope?

Basically, unless you met them face to face, you couldn't make an
intelligent assessment of what the racial or ethnic demographics of
this group. And I still don't think it's a relevant concern.


-- 
thanks for letting me change the magnetic patterns on your hard disk.