The Coq mailing list

[Emilio Jesús Gallego Arias <e AT x80.org>]

Dear all,

let me piggyback on José Manuel's mail as to respectfully request to
everybody not to initiate a lengthy discussion on the topics José Manuel
mentions on this mailing list.

Such topics are largely orthogonal to Coq and have been treated at depth
on some other venues. In my very humble opinion, the Coq Club mailing
list may not be the best venue for them.

Actual discussion on concrete steps to improve Coq's diversity situation
and on the community is much welcome of course.

Best regards,
Emilio

José Manuel Rodríguez Caballero 
<josephcmac AT gmail.com>
 writes:

> Dear Coq Community,
>
>   As a Cuban member of Coq community I would like to say a few words about
> diversity, because I am genetically the most diverse of us. I consider that
> it is not the responsibility of Coq users to address problems as complex as
> diversity, because most of us are not qualified for such a task. Such a
> subject should be addressed by experts in social sciences and biology. To
> put Coq users to try to solve such a problem is like to put experts in
> social science, which never programmed in Coq before, to develop a library
> in Coq about machine learning. The opinion of an ignorant person in a given
> subject has negative value in a discussion about this subject: we should be
> humble.
>
> Finally, James Damore addressed the question of "diversity" in computer
> science. He was fired.
>
> https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3914586/Googles-Ideological-Echo-Chamber.pdf
>
> Sincerely yours,
> José Manuel RODRIGUEZ CABALLERO
>
>
> El lun., 4 feb. 2019 a las 20:31, Emilio Jesús Gallego Arias 
> (<e AT x80.org>)
> escribió:
>
>> Dear Coq Community,
>>
>> We would like to invite everybody to an online session about improving
>> diversity in the Coq Community next Wednesday, Feb 6th at 16:00 (4 p.m.)
>> Paris time.
>>
>> The session will be part of the monthly Coq Working Group and is open
>> to everyone [as the Coq WG is].
>>
>> People who have had difficulty interacting with the community, or those
>> who come from underrepresented backgrounds within the Coq demographic
>> are especially encouraged to attend and share their views.
>>
>> You can join using a browser, please follow the instructions here:
>> https://github.com/coq/coq/wiki/CoqWG-2019-02-06
>>
>> Context:
>> --------
>>
>> It is no secret that the diversity situation in the Coq community
>> is quite dire, to put it softly.
>>
>> The Coq Development team takes these concerns very seriously.
>>
>> Informal discussions about diversity have already occurred at a few
>> developer meetings, a Code of Conduct [1,2,3] was added to Coq, and
>> we are looking into Outreachy [4].
>>
>> However, we still face a chicken-and-egg problem: the large majority of
>> people who have participated in such discussions belong to the dominant
>> profile, thus the very feedback we need from those falling outside of
>> the dominant profile is still missing.
>>
>> That's why we are really looking forward to your ideas on how to make
>> the Coq community more inclusive for everyone.
>>
>> Best regards,
>> Emilio
>>
>> [1] https://github.com/coq/coq/blob/master/CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md
>> [2] https://github.com/coq/coq/issues/6477
>> [3] https://github.com/coq/coq/pull/8071
>> [4] https://www.outreachy.org/
>>