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Mozilla to remove “meritocracy” from governance docs because it's “problematic”

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Re: Mozilla to remove “meritocracy” from governance docs because it's “problematic”

#111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Words are important. Diversity is important. Changing words like "meritocracy" does not improve diversity. It is the illusion of diversity, a feel-good opportunity for well-intentioned bystanders. The true intent is for a small group of highly politically motivated people to gain more control. The governance documents are about control and changing those documents means a shift in control. The movement we are seeing…

you sound like a conspiracy theorist. it is changing an inappropriate word, not shifting control over the entire company Mozilla. i doubt you care about diversity or improving the quality of the open source project

The evidence cited for meritocracy being an inappropriate word, a study on GitHub pull requests, has been widely debunked.

Meritocracy is only an inappropriate word if you believe that certain groups of people will never be able to participate on a level playing field.

That notion is of course incredibly condescending towards members of those groups.

The goal should be to advance everyone in the meritocracy through outreach and training, not to abandon the value of meritocracy.

The proposal itself makes it clear the change is merely for cosmetic purposes, to make certain people feel better, not actually increase diversity.

If you care about diversity you should oppose the notion that certain groups of people are incapable of participating on their own terms.

This is about empowering a small but loud group of political activists who want to remake a software project to fit their fringe world view.

Do you care more about affirming their politics or the quality of software?

Re: Mozilla to remove “meritocracy” from governance docs because it's “problematic”

#113
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? People who interpret 'meritocracy' in a narrow, little known historical context, as being a conspiracy against miniorities, rather than it's currently accepted form, sound like conspiracy theorists.

that is quite the stretch. thinking a word should be updated or clarified does not make me a "conspiracy theorist". What am I conspiring against? people fighting so hard against a simple change to make the sentence more inclusive are just fighting to keep their antiquated system of bias in place

They are proposing removing meritocracy based on their political view that certain classes of people will never be able to participate on a level playing field.

They are the ones advancing a narrative of exclusion, telling individuals in whole swaths that they can never compete in open source projects.

They have no evidence to support this of course, just what they were taught in their sociology classes at uni.

In reality though they are the ones pushing outdated bias.

Re: Mozilla to remove “meritocracy” from governance docs because it's “problematic”

#114
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it has been proven that oppressed people cannot judge their oppression

I think you're missing your /s tag. If that's not sarcasm, I kindly ask you not to call me oppressed. This pretty much makes my point for me as well that an attempt to "help" me is nothing more than pure condescension and racism.

It s sarcasm. I think we need new vocabularies, the terms have been commoditized to death

Re: Mozilla to remove “meritocracy” from governance docs because it's “problematic”

#115

Meritocracy means your elevation within a group is not influenced by your ancestory, wealth, socail status, who are your friends with, how much you were/are-being oppressed, charisma or twitter followers. The group has a mission. You help with mission, you go up. You work against the mission, you go down. Thats meritocracy.

> The group has a mission. You help with mission, you go up. You work against the mission, you go down. Thats meritocracy. Honest question. Do you think you've cleared anything up with this definition? I don't think you've gotten anywhere closer to the truth. If only it were so easy to know what the mission is or what is in service of the mission. In life, in software, there are enough derelict projects, aspirations,…

> If only it were so easy to know what the mission is or what is in service of the mission.

This is how you get evaluated on a quarterly (or yearly) basis at a job. You had goals. Did you achieve them? Did you fall short? You were given tasks and a timeline (perhaps you even helped set the timeline). Did you complete the tasks? Were there excessive bugs? Were you on time?

These are all relatively simple things to measure, which is why they're used so often. If you tie merit to your performance in relation to stated goals (and I think that's reasonable), it's pretty straightforward to measure.

Re: Mozilla to remove “meritocracy” from governance docs because it's “problematic”

#116

Meritocracy, like all words that reduce to "good thing", are always troublesome. No one ever claims to be a "bad thing"ocracy. The issue is the opacity of the concept of merit. How do you distinguish being a meritocracy in some good sense from insisting you are a meritocracy and thus poisoning any discussion that you are not one? Using words to maintain a culture has a sort of Newton's third law. It might push you to…

Well meritocracy means we will try to select and give influence/recognition based on merit. When someone tries to push an idea like "let's have more Asians" or "let's have more men" in the project we can direct them to the very first statement where they see we do selection based on merit and not skin color, gender or sexual orientation. Any attempt to introduce gender/race/sexual orientation quotas will promptly be…

> Well meritocracy means we will try to select and give influence/recognition based on merit. When someone tries to push an idea like "let's have more Asians" or "let's have more men" ...

Isn't the argument normal something more like: "I don't think we are living up to the description of meritocracy. Our demographics lean heavily one direct and we lack female/male/asian/ for no merit based reason. Lets do something about that."

The core of such arguments are an attempt to support/bolster meritocracy.

Re: Mozilla to remove “meritocracy” from governance docs because it's “problematic”

#117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you sound like a conspiracy theorist. it is changing an inappropriate word, not shifting control over the entire company Mozilla. i doubt you care about diversity or improving the quality of the open source project

The evidence cited for meritocracy being an inappropriate word, a study on GitHub pull requests, has been widely debunked. Meritocracy is only an inappropriate word if you believe that certain groups of people will never be able to participate on a level playing field. That notion is of course incredibly condescending towards members of those groups. The goal should be to advance everyone in the meritocracy through o…

your arguments are hypberolic in some cases, as changing or clarifying a word or sentence even is not "remake(ing) a software project". and I think the word meritocracy is vague, a overarching word used to describe many things to many people, mozilla should instead simply be more clear about what that means. what is the "playing field", that itself is a metaphor for sports and physical ability I guess. How will the ability of those chosen for participation under this meritocracy be judged

Re: Mozilla to remove “meritocracy” from governance docs because it's “problematic”

#118
post #22

This is the suggested modification: "Mozilla is an open source project. Our community is structured as a virtual organization. Authority is primarily distributed to both volunteer and employed community members as they show their ability through contributions to the project. The project also seeks to debias this system of distributing authority through active interventions that engage and encourage participation from…

It also adds language about debias.

So it doesn't simply remove meritocracy to appease the far-left activists.

It specifically inserts language to appear them, reaffirm their world view.

Is it really necessary to create a safe space for fringe political activists to create substantive diversity? No.

It's also promoted by high-level Mozilla employees in response to a recent anti-meritocracy movement.

After what happened to FreeBSD's CoC you can hardly claim this is happening in a vacuum, it's a cause now.

Re: Mozilla to remove “meritocracy” from governance docs because it's “problematic”

#119
post #112

It's strange this has so many points and comments but almost instantly disappeared from the front page of HN.

Story with more comments than points always disappear faster from front page.

Gotcha.

Re: Mozilla to remove “meritocracy” from governance docs because it's “problematic”

#120

Meritocracy means your elevation within a group is not influenced by your ancestory, wealth, socail status, who are your friends with, how much you were/are-being oppressed, charisma or twitter followers. The group has a mission. You help with mission, you go up. You work against the mission, you go down. Thats meritocracy.

> The group has a mission. You help with mission, you go up. You work against the mission, you go down. Thats meritocracy. Honest question. Do you think you've cleared anything up with this definition? I don't think you've gotten anywhere closer to the truth. If only it were so easy to know what the mission is or what is in service of the mission. In life, in software, there are enough derelict projects, aspirations,…

If the group does not have enough consensus on what mission is or what is in service of the mission, then group cannot advance anywhere and can only be disbanded.
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