I've had a few days with my head full of governance stuff, and I want to publish and comment on a small section of something that I've written:

One big lesson I've learned being a child of an affective psychologist is that, in human groups, feelings matter. They matter so much, that often, they completely overshadow facts. But emotions and facts are managed differently. Communication (and lack thereof) about facts impact feelings. People's experiences also impact feelings. Different people will feel differently about the same facts.

/1

And to give my interpretation: when we talk about community safety and governance, when we say: "We want everybody to be welcomed" we should actually say (and sometimes we do): "We want everybody to **feel** welcomed".

So when people discuss about somebody with discriminatory and unhuman views on migration, or about RMS, remember: it's not about facts, it's about feelings.

Sometimes, it seems like it matters whether a mod has the rights to enforce his discriminatory views on others, or the moderation process is so good, that it will avoid those issues

/2

In practice, even if a moderation process were perfect and avoids all biases, that's not enough. People under risk of being discriminated will see somebody with clearly discriminatory views and not *feel* welcomed. You can communicate the amazing process, and that might help, but won't solve the issue, some people will still feel threatened.

So if we want to collectively fix these issues in FOSS, we have to stop thinking about the facts: whether somebody has the right to be invited to my conference, or whether my moderation process avoids biases. Instead, think: how will X person from a certain geography feel if I do Y. Will they feel welcomed? How do I let them know? Is letting them know enough?

/3

In practice, that means working on our communication and empathy skills. Yes, that's a lot less fun for engineers than working on factual problems. But emotions are all big drivers for FOSS. Some project might want contributors only interested in the technicality of their project, but most of us care about our projects for much deeper reasons. And we usually want FOSS for all, without discrimination. It's not a technical problem, it's an emotional one, let's face it straight.

/end

PS: Yes, doing this is terribly hard. I'm terrified the day (that will come), where some real big issue shows up in postmarketOS and I got to face my own biases and fears to the face and under pressure.

It's fine to make mistakes. But let's take the discussion as what it is, a matter of how others feel. And not a matter of whether our "facts" are "right" according to our own world view

@pabloyoyoista I have a bad feeling about this :-(. Yes, facts matter. Saying that it is okay to act on feelings basically means you can do whatever you want and that can't be questioned.

@pavel @pabloyoyoista My personal feeling is that people are getting too much sensitive (including myself sometimes) and that they should be taught that technical opinion and fact should be expressed without hiding even hurting facts. But on the other hand it should be expressed and made clean that it is not personal attack etc. On the other hand I agree that programming and even all complex technical decisions are about feeling and taste because no human or even ML system has enough memory and computational power to do real deep search in all alternatives. The state space of possible solutions is to large. But I have my personal feeling (yes again that wold), than it is much worse to attempt to hide facts or be afraid to pass forward what you believe are facts. Then everybody needs to analyze if that what you say is what you mean or if you say it that way that you afraid etc… So nobody can build idea about different persons thoughts about his, her code etc… So I consider that it is right when I sometimes feel injustice caused to me or I cannot find same point of view as others. But it should not lead to lies, defamation etc. In the worst case, the result should be agree to disagree which can lead even to project fork or move to another project. May it be, the opinions can be communicated later and advantage of joining the forces prevails losts required by compromises. (Excuse my English, may it be it can shift my idea a little from what I mean and “feel”).