[Scale-planning] Free Software Representation at SCaLE

[Phil Dibowitz]

On Wed, Jan 25, 2012 at 05:11:59PM -0800, Mark Holmquist wrote:
> I'm not insinuating anything sinister. I'm not even insinuating any
> intentional favoritism on the part of....well, anyone! I think that the
> mission statement (see previous messages) and various information pages
> about the conference happens to demonstrate a preference for one
> community over any other. In fact, the CFP [0] only mentions two, so any
> other communities might feel excluded from that.
> 
> Again, I don't allege any wrongdoing. I just suspect that SCaLE can do
> better to make people feel comfortable.

OK, so I'm looking for specific examples. The above implies you'd like to see
our our mission and our CFP worded differently, and then this:

> see the mission statement and the CFP, id.). It joined abandoning
> Twitter (which is a nonfree service), removing official iPhone
> implementations of information apps, and other similar drastic steps
> that, while maybe commonplace for free software-only conferences, would
> be very *out* of place, at least currently, for SCaLE.

Implies you'd like us to not use twitter, facebook, and g+.

Does that summarize what you'd like to see different?

I could see updating our mission to say "Free and Open Source software" or the
more canonical "F/OSS". We can certainly discuss such a change.

The same change to our CFP - if we decide it makes sense for our mission -
would presumably be reasonable.

Not using the standard media, however, I don't expect will happen. You don't
convert more people to using F/OSS by only advertising on places where F/OSS
users are. We post on identi.ca as well, of course... we cover as many methods
of getting the word out there as possible.

> in making people feel at home. While I once might have been criticizing
> the apparent exclusion of Free Software, I think further discussion on
> the subject has brought me to realize that there is a simpler and more
> neutral way to go about this, and that most claims I might have raised
> would have been baseless.

That's awesome. I'm glad. But I still feel like there's mostly implications of
things you dislike as opposed to suggestions on what you'd like actually done
(or done instead, or in addition to).

-- 
Phil Dibowitz                             phil at ipom.com
Open Source software and tech docs        Insanity Palace of Metallica
http://www.phildev.net/                   http://www.ipom.com/

"Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter
 and those who matter don't mind."
 - Dr. Seuss

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 198 bytes
Desc: Digital signature
URL: <http://lists.linuxfests.org/pipermail/scale-planning/attachments/20120125/f2c4c41b/attachment.pgp>