It's literally been like a week since I tooted about how project decisionmaking at a conference means gatekeeping, and now we have an online conference charging admission(??) on a proprietary platform(????) claiming to be all about "making decisions on how to move fedi forward"
This is not how community governance works, people
To reiterate some of the issues with conferences:
- An entry fee keeps out poor people
- A scheduled conference time keeps out anyone who does not have much spare time (again, especially poor people) or who cannot just decide to do something at a specific time (eg. neurodiverse people)
- Video/audio calls exclude people with auditory processing issues or hearing impairments
- A physical conference excludes both disabled and poor people (for accessibility and travel cost reasons respectively)
- A conference on a proprietary platform excludes anyone who for whatever reason cannot use the proprietary client; this ranges from OS support issues to accessibility issues
- Not to mention all the safety concerns for marginalized people when being forced to interact with others in real-time
Centering your project decisionmaking around conferences means that the only people who can fully participate (and therefore be represented) will be able-bodied, well-off, sufficiently neurotypical, and otherwise privileged.
@StroomAfwaarts Generally speaking, for project governance, you want some kind of asynchronous communication method to be the 'primary' one. Such as forum threads, or something else that allows people to participate at their own speed on their own time.
That doesn't mean that conferences should be abolished entirely; they can have legitimate social purposes. But there should be an active effort to not have it turn into a clique, and to ensure that anything discussed at such a conference only serves as input to the *actual* (asynchronous) decisionmaking process, and does not replace it.
@joepie91 so, what do you recommend as an alternative?