[TriLUG] proposed amendment to the bylaws

[Cristóbal Palmer]

On Thursday, April 25, 2013 at 4:48 PM, Steve Litt wrote:

>  
> Personally, if it were me writing the policy, instead of including
> technical background, I'd just have a blanket policy against personal
> insults. That prevents person A from calling person B "ignorant of
> Linux", requiring him instead to say "I think you're mistaken".


How about "experience level with Linux" instead? Basically what I'm trying to get at is newb abuse. I'll confess that "technical background" was my own contribution and I'm not hugely proud of it. We can definitely do something like you suggest: drop that "technical background" part and add elsewhere some language that makes it clear that making fun of people's novice status is not okay. I liked "technical background" because it could also cover the case of somebody who is using approaches/software that seems terribly outdated because that's what they're comfortable with. Pointing such a person to newer practices and suggesting things that will meet their needs is cool. Making fun of them is not. Possibly an anti-harassment policy is the wrong place to try to make that point.

As I said to Steering folks before I brought this to the full list, I'm not a huge fan of making lots of edits or big edits to the template because then it's back on us to defend what we've produced rather than being able to use the upstream and the wider community as a resource. I'll quote myself:

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I'm saying that doing so puts us in territory that is off on our own and that we have to do more work to maintain. It's akin to using standard libraries vs. writing your own code from the ground up. There are contexts and good reasons for both; I want to make sure we have good reasons.

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Thanks for bringing us on track to picking language that fits our group and meets our needs.

Cheers,
--  
Cristóbal Palmer
cmpalmer.org