[OSGeo-Discuss] Mentoring program @OSGeo[-women]

[Chris Puttick]

At terrible risk of going against the grain here, but I don't like discrimination, whatever its guise and whatever its motive. Call me idealistic, but it has been my experience that discrimination has only one outcome and that is discrimination. Me, I'm human; so far I've never worked or encountered a non-human intelligence so I cannot comment beyond humanity. But I can say I've worked with some great humans and some crap humans and some mediocre humans in a wide variety of sectors, and I observed no relationship between their greatness/crapness/mediocrity and their gender/sexual preferences/race/religion/musical tastes or even, despite my expectations, whether they or not they liked dogs.

Adjustments in behaviour, organisational structures, language, special programmes et al. to favour one identifiable group over others serves only to discriminate against the others. It does nothing to resolve the real issue, which is the mistaken belief that all members of one identifiable group are inherently unable or less able to do a thing, or the similarly mistaken belief that the behaviour of one or two people from an established community towards you or your identifiable group is something you can then tar that other entire identifiable group with. In fact such "affirmative action" has the opposite result; it fosters discrimination by continually reinforcing the idea that one group needs help over another "opposite" group and, worse, reinforces the idea that these broad group distinctions are real rather than artificial constructs.

It seems to me that the greatest cause of discrimination statistics is that idea that occurs when you see yourself as being part of an identifiable group and use that to guide your behaviour i.e. when you look to your groups' behaviours for guidance on what it is you might do with your life. Maybe my crazy brand of idealism is doomed to failure; maybe, for example, Baha'i followers will only ever engage in occupations that other Baha'i do, and Hindus will only ever do jobs other Hindus do. It remains however my hope (and guides how I act myself) that people will realise that these groupings, like most others, are entirely artificial when it comes to determining what you do in life, and that others will join me in that belief and act accordingly.

Regards

Chris

----- Original Message -----
> Hi all, and sorry for cross-posting,
> 
> I want to share with you what I found, surfing from link to link from
> a mail sent to Systers ml.
> I stumbled first on
> http://www.linuxpromagazine.com/Online/Blogs/ROSE-Blog-Rikki-s-Open-Source-Exchange/Inequality-Choices-and-Hitting-a-Wall
> 
> but I felt it was not the case of OSGeo.
> Then I found a link about the female representation in 2010 Google
> Summer of Code - very encouraging:
> http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/08/sixth-annual-summer-of-code-flexes-some.html
> 
> and finally a good seed for OSGeo-women:
> http://www.linuxpromagazine.com/Online/Blogs/ROSE-Blog-Rikki-s-Open-Source-Exchange/FOSS-Mentoring-A-tribute-to-female-mentors
> 
> What about a mentoring program like Debian-women's?
> http://women.debian.org/mentoring/
> 
> feedback is most welcome!
> 
> cheers,
> Anne
> --
> http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Anne_Ghisla
> 
> _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list
> Discuss at lists.osgeo.org
> http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss


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