We ended up moving the logged. project-focused discussions to #ubuntu-women-project and #ubuntu-women has stayed pretty much as it was :) Come hang out, it’s a friendly place!

-Leigh

While #ubuntu-women has been changed back to what it’s main purpose was, was there another channel made to focus on those other people that wanted to vent about other geek issues after #UW adopted it’s older operating policy?

I hang out on IRC everyday, and are having a hard time finding a safe channel to really vent my disappointment in other geeky topics or have a meaningful discussion about other things. The ones I have hung out in weren’t safe at all and I was trolled out of them.

While #U-W is specifically about Ubuntu and issues surrounding that, it would be nice to have that other space to discuss things.

School was really easy for me as a kid. One night when I was really tired and having trouble writing a report, my mom pointed out that maybe that’s the way lots of people feel all the time. I’ve never forgotten that.

That was one of the reasons I stopped hanging around UW. And lately, that seems to be the major concern of the project. The lack of any mention to the MarkS episode on the very place I was expecting to be the first one to raise the issue made it very clear. God forbidden to upset the always cheerful and greatest community ever… (yeah, that was an irony)

What I am seeing happening now is that men are getting frustrated at the thought that they might have to tread carefully to resist subconsciously dominating over the women. Even some women in the channel are getting frustrated because some men might have wrong ideas about them because they listen to issues other women need to raise, or are just slightly allergic to confronting issues head-on because those issues are a bit sad, and want to drown it out by blaring Helen Reddy and hoping the bad stuff goes away effortlessly.

This is now culminating at a scary point. People are now dragging logging and stuff in to the new safe-space-pushed-further-from-the-community channel. You know, just in case some of these women talk funk about some men. That’s not safe.

The “geez, more men” is “this conversation about women is becoming dominated by men”, it is the fear that the channel is becoming about how men feel about how women feel, instead of just about how women feel. Women who do need the safe space are now being pushed further from the core community, and that’s the opposite of what the project is supposed to be doing.

As it is now, men are perfectly welcome, and totally encouraged to participate. They just need to understand that setting the boundaries is solely the prerogative of the women. If they can understand “no” and “stop”, then there’s absolutely nothing to worry about. We all make mistakes, and “sorry” fixes the greater majority of them.

I was in the meeting with mdz and was one of the guys who brought up the issue of the conflicting advice. I have seen both sides of the “everyone welcome”, “ugh, not more men” argument, and the point I raised in the meeting was that as a guy it’s difficult to know what the ‘right’ thing to do is.

This has been clarified since, but I’m certainly not the only one who felt this.