Technical and socially competent leadership is compatible -- actually, well-aligned -- with diverse representation.
When someone starts out with bullet-point one devoted to orthogonal social issues and not the actual goals of the foundation and how to reach them, it's fairly clear where they stand.
Like, cops using secret rules to determine guilt would be considered dystopian basically anywhere.
If you want to have a talk about the also completely unrelated issue of facial recognition, we can do that too.
The way that you get the average user to care about software freedom is by drawing lines between it and seemingly unrelated issues. You don't say "proprietary software means you can't edit the code", you say "proprietary software means more surveillance tech everywhere". And the way that surveillance tech works is that it follows a very specific "shitty technology adoption curve"[0]. It will first be weaponized against socially acceptable targets such as criminals first, and then to social minorities that don't have the leverage to say 'no', and then to poor people at large, and so on and so forth up the chain of oppression.
Of course, because of how this adoption curve works, a foundation staffed entirely with old white guys isn't going to be inherently aware of these sorts of problems. They are going to be fighting them by accident, and losing out on a way to do effective outreach about the problem they want to solve.
[0] Thanks to Cory Doctorow for pointing this one out.
Black people have darker faces with generally softer features, women paint themselves with makeup and frequently leave the house looking less like themselves than other people.
The sorts of solutions that a prescribed - more diversity - do nothing to fix those issues.
Multi-perspective and multi-frame processing can be used to reconstruct 3D models of a well-lit individual, which has the potential to get around makeup induced false contouring.
Solving the issues of clowns and women - but how do you deal people who are genetically predisposed to being poorly lit?
Infrared's probably your best option, and it's already common place in security.
There are multiple factors that lead to the software not working - and none of them stem from the fact that it's proprietary.
(The Stallman notion that anything other than copyleft needs to be erased is fucking ridiculous - and I really don't think that you'll find traction with it on a site where almost everyone uses the profits from software to feed themselves and their families.)
There is a related notion that would have granted you some traction - that tax payer funded software should be open source.
This nicely parallels the issue of public access to publicly funded scientific research - which has gotten a lot of traction here, over time.
As far as rising authoritarianism is concerned, you've chosen a weird hill to die on.
The court is packed, and the already broken two party system is being gerrymandered into oblivion.
You're focusing on the tools being used without regard for the intention and the users.
Anyway, you didn't even get to the fun part of the conversation - that facial recognition struggles with black people and women.
Which is a fun little conversation that people like to politicise and blame on the people who wrote the code.
Only if you begin by presuming diversity isn't a benefit on it's own.
The author contends that Stallman (and through his leadership, the FSF) ends up repelling the very kind of interconnected community that could sustain the free software movement. Thus, their first suggestion (replace Stallman, and include different kinds of people in future leadership) is directly related to that specific issue.
It's actually a rather nicely written piece, and they support their suggestions in the narrative pretty well. Perhaps you skipped ahead (or perhaps you just disagree, which is certainly your right), but they absolutely didn't "start out" with "orthogonal social issues". They made the case for why those issues matter and then connected them to their suggestions.
Reality begs to differ.
If they're well aligned, where are these people? Have they been oppressed by not being given a chance? Let's see where we are in 20 years when that argument can finally be put to rest (when's the last time you saw a positive _male_ role model in films or other pop-culture, tech-related or otherwise?).
I’m not the best person to ask about movies, but most example of protagonist “hackers” that comes to mind include white males. Counter examples that come to mind are “The Web” (female), and Sens8 (transgender lead, helped by straight white male)…
That said, I may have misunderstood your point, but happy to correct it elaborate if I’m off base!
My first point was that if it were true that "technical and social leadership" indeed was compatible and even "well-aligned", then why is it we don't see that in people in leadership positions? Where are they?
Then I pre-empted the tired argument that we don't see them because they've been oppressed for so long. I suggested that culture has been so "progressive" in recent years, that there are no longer any positive male role models (the over-compensating pendulum swing, in place of actual progress), so now that that's done, let's see what effect it has had on future society in 20 years, because we won't be able to blame "the patriarchy" or whatever any more.
Now having said all that, I'm super happy to hear that you've had a positive experience in diverse workplaces :) I'm old, and remember when being openly gay wasn't fun.
I’ve been fortunate in some ways, but nothing came easy to me. I didn’t come from money, didn’t graduate college, didn’t know anyone… I moved to LA just to escape that toxic environment, and found a good job developing embedded systems in 2 weeks. I’m an autodidact, so my only qualifications were a portfolio of projects, including an old TI DSP project and a pre-Wi-Fi embedded wireless device. Over the next ~15 years, I kept moving up in rank and salary, changed jobs a few times, received patents, contributed to papers, and was lucky enough to be mentored by some truly amazing people…
I’ve always felt success is a combination of hard work and luck, even for those “born into it”. If true, that likely means for everyone like me, there are a dozen or so who didn’t make it, or never took a chance.
And yeah, being gay still isn’t fun. Maybe it made it easier to take a chance moving 2600 miles from home though — I figured I’d be dead within a year if I stayed where I was…
Hope that doesn’t sound like some kind of humble brag; I’ve obviously had my share of failures and loss.. That said, given how lucky I feel at this point (I’m in my 40s), I couldn’t understand how you’ve never met a positive role model… But I do now, and it was naive of me to extrapolate my experience into the general population… And I’m not suggesting I worked harder or did anything to deserve my good fortune… FWIW, I’m really sorry you (and likely most people) haven’t known the same men and women I’ve been lucky enough to know…
Really hope that doesn’t sound like some arrogant humblebrag, or diminish your hard work!
Defo, but I'd tweak that a little and say they come hand in hand. The luck comes from hard work, or at least just going for it, it doesn't just magically land in your lap.
I have a similar background; grew up poor in a rough area, low expectations from my teachers due to my ethnicity, and thanks to my parents, worked through all that to become what most would call successful. The breaks came from opportunities, which came from putting myself out there.
It's a mistake to think people are lucky, because it implies things just happen to you. Nobody has it easy. Even those who are apparently patently lucky in that they have rich parents, are not lucky. The only thing worse than not having anything, is having everything.
Three off the top of my head.
I wonder why it is you wouldn't have run into any...
Do we live in the same reality?
If you imagine dealing out people like cards into stacks chosen randomly and enumerating the demographics of each stack then large stacks would tend towards the population demographics but many smaller stacks would have all sorts of distributions. The only way to ensure a small group is diverse or a large group isn't is to select them for immutable characteristics instead of skill.