Why ?

Since a few years, I noticed a increase of people protesting around events location, mainly due to safety issues.

For example, the Linux Foundation faced a protest after announcing OSS Summit NA in Austin, Texas in 2022 (see the tweet that started it, the response by the Linux Foundation ). This was related to Texas abortion ban in 2022, but same things could happen in place where we organized Flock in the past, like Poland in 2021.

I have found several instances of the same type of protests both on the internal side of my employer firewall (in 2015 for one example), but also in various big communities related to free software: Wikimedia in 2008 with Egypt, 2018 with North Carolina, 2019 with Tunisia, 2022 with Singapore; OpenStreetMap in 2018 with Tanzania, 2023/2024 with Kenya.

There was also discussion in academics circles, like PLDI 2023 in Florida, or a 2023 Bioethics conference in Qatar.

Since the Fedora vision state that inclusivity is one of the goal, I think it should be reflected in our practice and policy and not just be a warm fuzzy feeling.

What ?

As someone who keep in hostage the communityblog, I request a helicopter and lots of cash. Wait, wrong text.

As a participant to the Fedora DEI team, I prepared a policy proposal that was discussed with the rest of the DEI team and people in the community over the last few months. You can see a artist rendition of the page here (pay no attention to the menu from the Fedora DEI doc repo). I also submitted a MR here (that may or may not build for now).

The discussion was mainly on this bug, during meetings and on discourse (links in the bug). There was also a workshop done during Flock 2024 and I presented on that topic during Devconf.cz in 2023.

The proposal is inspired from the Openstreetmap Foundation Safety policy but I also had that in mind since 2019 after seeing the WMF (WikiMedia Foundation) repeating the same mistakes and after Flock 2019 in Budapest.

The policy mainly state that we will not organize Flock in a location where the applicable laws would have a detrimental effect on attendance and/or the event from the point of view of inclusion. And if there is no choice for some reason, the Council will have to explain why the policy was not followed or what happened. As Flock is usually organized in NA or in the UE, I think we will not face thorny questions wrt events in Africa or Middle East.

To give the example that I had in mind when I redacted it, if Flock were to be organized in Moscow, Russia, I think that we would not be able to hold a DEI team meeting due to the federal law preventing "LGBT propaganda". As a very real example, the cops shut down a My Little Poney convention in Moscow, and I think we do not want to risk that. While in 2024, there is other reasons to not do Flock in Moscow, similar laws have been or are being enacted in Kyrgyzstan, Georgia (the ex USSR country, not the US state), Bulgaria or Hungary (where we had Flock in 2019) since a few years.

So one criteria could be "not having a law preventing from doing a DEI meeting" (on the basis that a DEI meeting would also be speaking of Fedora Pride).

Another criteria that was discussed was something along "not outlawing homosexuality", as it would surely draw protests from people at the intersection of the Fedora community and the LGBT community . Most of those laws also tend to lump transidentity and homosexuality together, so this would surely have a chilling effect on our trans community members.

The policy is for now incomplete with 0 criteria. They will be added later by following regular council policy modification process with bite sized proposal to let folks discuss of them. The goal is to have simple of "yes/"no" tests. While that's not going to be sufficient to cover some proposal, done is better than perfect and the approach can be refined later.

In the initial discourse thread, people suggested a few criteria around same sex marriage recognition, abortion rights and safety risk to pregnant people , toilets and trans rights among others. This should be taken in account of course, but will likely requires a bit more work before being proposed (as the criteria should also be clear, with pointer to find laws, etc as explained in the policy).

During the Flock 2024 workshop, people also suggested others criteria, the main one being around economic inequality. This is also a valid concern, but would requires a different policy as this is neither a yes/no test, nor based on laws.

Finally, people suggested to pay more attention to the venue itself for accessibility, safety, etc among others. Again, this is a valid concern, but would requires a different approach. Unlike laws, this can't be verified remotely and easily (cause plenty of country have laws equivalent to the American Disability Act, and from what I know, that's not sufficient in practice).