Why Hackers Must Welcome Social Justice Advocates

medium.com

5 points·pron··2 comments

In general, since the article is titled with an adversarial generalization, Social Justice Advocates need to do a better job of projecting the empathy and inclusionariness that the most vocal of them demand of others, instead of making bullet points of how other people need to change their behaviour.

They might find that empathizing with others may give them the insight they need to to influence the cultural norms and social behaviours they wish to change.

Relevant, but not entirely on this point: http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/nov/27/prejudic...

First-time contributors are regularly dismissed and even attacked for naive implementations of needed functionality. Projects that favor the contributions of established developers do not leave space for learning, growth and failure when they punish newcomers for their lack of experience.

What the author seems to not recognize is that some of those projects are critical and some of them are used and protect activists in jurisdictions in which advocacy actually have non trivial risks.

If the inclusion means that we will get more Heartbleeds - is this really a price we are willing to pay?

Also - open source is infinitely forkable - if you don't like the community or culture - just fork it and build your own. I have always disliked the approach of - join a community - force the community to change so it can accommodate you. Which is the main tactic a lot of those Social Justice Advocates use.

Edit: Also a persons background don't matter when it comes to implementing FFT or a red black tree. Which is why tech people tend to ignore it.

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