[UbuntuWomen] Ubuntu-women IRC channel discussion

[Elizabeth Krumbach]

On Mon, Jan 4, 2010 at 1:00 AM, vid <vid at svaksha.com> wrote:
> As regards, "being secretive and gossipy"... *sigh*, I disagree.

This isn't something anyone I know within the project is saying, this
is a perception from the wider community that we've been fighting for
years. It tends to be something like: "People go to #ubuntu-women to
complain/gossip about and insult/bad mouth men and projects that are
bothering them and the unlogged nature of the channel lets them get
away with this when they wouldn't be able to in other Ubuntu
channels."

Of course this isn't the case, the channel is highly productive and
the infrequent incident reporting that does occur typically is quite
level-headed and non-accusatory (not that we'd want this indexed by
Google regardless)

> Women
> do need support in floss and if an unlogged channel makes the
> transition to floss as a contributor easier, probably reduces the
> silent loss of female contributors, then why not have a unlogged
> channel !?!
>
> I'd love to hear more thoughts....

I think it's vital to keep in mind that the channel is not inherently
"Safe" right now, logging or not. It may have been true when the
channel had fewer than 20 people in it and we knew everyone, but that
is no longer true. There are now frequently over 70 people in the
channel, several of whom we don't know, new people all the time, and
general Ubuntu IRC policies (which I strongly approve of) mean we
can't just remove folks because they don't introduce themselves and we
have to give everyone a chance even if they may "seem creepy" at first
join, etc.

Since we don't know everyone, there could be a bot or a user logging
the channel and posting logs (or, perhaps worse, collecting key log
snippits they feel can harm the project and posting them somewhere
where they can highlight them). I'd really, really hate for people to
be talking about their employer, other people within the Ubuntu
project, or other F/OSS projects and then getting hurt because they
were under the impression that it was completely safe to discuss
everything and name names, it's just not.

-- 
Elizabeth Krumbach // Lyz // pleia2
http://www.princessleia.com