Please stop making stance or non-professional statement in release announcement and Rust official channels

meta
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I may be coming late to this conversation but I wanted to respond to this statement. I do agree that that was a very US-centric comment, but I also understand that most of Rust's team members are US citizens.

Since Rust's community is primarily Western, it is understandable that all political statements address mostly Western issues only. It would not be reasonable to demand full coverage of geopolitical issues from Rust's leadership just for consistency. Nor do I believe this could ever be offensive to a reasonable person.

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The two in-person Rust all-hands events were done in the Berlin offices of Mozilla also to minimize required transatlantic flights. That might have changed since then, but around 2018/2019 AFAIK there were more team members in Europe than the US.

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Is that so? I'd always gotten the impression that there was a substantial European contingent.

EDIT: Doh, raced with Ralf.

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Thank you, that helps!

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A large part of what attracts me to Rust is the community's political stance of being inclusive.

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I understand Rust is related. What I emphasize is that not everyone wants to get involved in non-technical issues when they read technical feeds, maybe they don't care or simply they don't want to go off topics (like me).

Rust is related and everyone is deeply concerned, then make another PR and announcement to pay enough respect to such concerns instead of inserting a short statement into something that is not of the same topic. This does not respect technical readers nor readers who want to hear from Rust about this issue.

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I absolutely agree with @HuaguoShan. It deeply bothers me when I come to read technical reviews, documentation, releases, PRs or anything else, only to get bombarded with political or other non-technical issues. Its not that I don't sympathize with or not agree with whats being promoted or spoken about, its that I firmly believe its the wrong channel for this information. I will go to well established news channels or websites where I can consume this information, not through Rust release notes...

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To further elaborate, I can understand the view that as an organization, some want to support political or non technical issues publicly, but as this forum post shows, political or non technical issues do not gel with a percentage of the community (I wouldn't discount a silent majority). The reasons are wide and far, some not agreeing with the public view, some bothered with the constant bombardment of political or non technical issues, etc. Superficially, it looks like a good thing, but I personally believe (even professionally believe), this can, and will cause issues with community members, so why put the organization in this position in the first place?

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The problem with claiming a silent majority of support is, well, because they're silent, you don't know what they support.

Silence, while not strictly true, is generally supportive of the current behavior. So without any evidence otherwise, it would be a reasonable assumption that the "silent majority" support the core team on this.

There was, in fact, a small discussion around the appropriateness of the BLM note in that previous release. (I'm not linking it to avoid relitigation; you can search for it if you want to.) The general consensus there was the same: a note acknowledging support to disadvantaged individuals, as in line with the code of conduct, is reasonable.

Ultimately, though, the release notes and announcement are the work of the core and release teams. They have every right to put what they think is reasonable in (subject to the standard moderation channels of accountability and the code of conduct).

I personally support the, may I add small and reasonable, note in the release notes. It's not like it's a full news article, or otherwise distracting from the main content of the release article; it's merely a note that says "this thing is happening, and we continue to support disadvantaged people."

If it were more, or otherwise replaced the technical content of the post, I can understand thinking it out of place. But as is, it's less disruptive than ads, even.

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That is why I said silence of a technical party means nothing. If silence of a technical party means anything, this party simply cannot afford whataboutism.

Well, if you can stand with something like

Announcement:
We add some language features:
1. feature A
2. feature B
3. ...

And we stand with some ones....
Jan 1st

Update on Jan 2nd: we stand with some other ones....
Update on Jan 10th: we do not agree the invasion of some ones....

well, I respect your preference and I can say no more.

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This. Absolutely agree!

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This (multiple edits/updates) is not what's being done, though. Nobody here has suggested that's what should be done.

A position that this shouldn't be done is far different from a position that what has been done should have been separated.

A policy of strictly technical content (once you define what is technical content, anyway, which is not simple, since you want to include documentation and other work) would prevent what you are presenting as clearly too much. But also a bit of judgement calls on what's appropriate can do the same.

I don't think anyone wants to see the announcement posts be a laundry list of what's wrong in the world. But there's a gradient here between strictly technical to overly preachy. I trust the teams to find a balance.

And it's worth noting again: Rust's platform is explicitly supportive of LGBTQ+ people, which is, unfortunately, a political issue to some. There is no world where Rust is purely a technical, objective project. The mere existence and enforcement of the CoC is a political issue to some.

This is not directly relevant in the discussion at hand, but informs decisions.

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OK, I think whether or not to take stances is a bit beyond the topic here and it is not my original message (my original message is "please do technical stuff in technical channels and do non-technical stuff somewhere else" BTW). I personally conclude this (whether or not to take stances) like the below, you can express different opinions of course.

  • If any ones or groups inside Rust community want to make a stance and an announcement on non-technical issues, feel free to do it.
  • Do it with your names (group names, your masked ID....).
  • If any ones or groups think being silence means something and you must say something, be ready for whataboutism (just a kind reminder).
  • If any ones or groups think a political involvement is needed, then do it, (again) sign your names and publish it on specific channels like politicians do. A vague "Rust Team" is not an appropriate name as it involves too many people who may or may not want to get involved and a channel like Release Announcement is not appropriate as it involves too many audiences who may or may not want to get involved.

For pragmatic discussions on practically what to do, I would suggest go to my another post -- please-separate-technical-and-non-technical-announcements before this post gets too long to read and get involved.

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Yeah I agree there's a gradient, but honestly, do you think such a information flow (rust-lang.org -> Link with text "Version 1.59.0" -> Release Announcement -> Non-technical statements) is the balance you trust the teams to make?

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An argument has been made (multiple times, I think) that technology communities have a bad habit of entirely ignoring the societal issues that are entangled with technology. I fully agree -- when technology affects society, or society affects technology, then those social issues are absolutely part of the discourse that a primarily technological community should have.

However, this war is not really an example of that kind of issue. (At least I don't think it is, and I have not seen people claim that it is.) Hence I do not think that this argument applies here.

Another point that came up several times can, I think, be roughly paraphrased as follows: in the Rust community, we care about the well-being of the members of our community. When that well-being is threatened, the least we can do is express our support for them. That is all these statements are aiming to do; it is not their goal to take a stance on how we got here and who all should go down in history as leading us to this place. This takes some careful wording, and the people involved are very aware of that.

That is a very good argument, and I find myself agreeing. Thank you to everyone who patiently explained that!

This does make me wonder why we do not have such statements more often, in particular for large natural disasters (or global pandemics). But it is hard to draw a line and I assume the authors want to avoid having a discussion like this one each time... still, that would help demonstrate that the primary concern is caring for the people in our community, not commenting on world politics.

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Yeah, I totally agree. I think one of the reasons why not having these more often is that Rust, as an organization, don't have dedicated channels for these. And you know, it takes 6 weeks to publish a Release Announcement. That's one of the reasons why I advocate for separating technical and non-technical issues and setting up dedicated channels for them.

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Let me add my thoughts to the pile.

One thing I am fairly certain about is that we need consistency. We either do or do not make political statements. The current status quo is that we do this.

I don't know whether we should. I can get behind the position of "don't take politics to work/OSS", probably best exemplified by RalfJung's post. Rust project as a safe haven, isolated from the turmoils of the world, has a lot of appeal.

At the same time, I am sympathetic to the view that making official political statements on hard and divisive questions can make the world better. It is a very powerful message when even your programming language tells you that something's wrong with the world. The power comes from the very fact that the message bypasses traditional communication channels and can be delivered to those who wouldn't notice it otherwise.

To give a personal story here, Rust's outspoken positive attitude towards LGBTQ+ community definitively positively affected my life. In the country I grew up (Russia), LGBTQ+ was not visible, so I naturally perceived it as alien. Getting exposure to this community via Rust language helped me to normalize my attitude. I am thankful to Rust that it got me out of this particular bubble.

The two main problems I see with statements by Rust project are biases in focus and the side. There are indeed many issues in the world, and it indeed it is highly likely that Rust project is going to be biased to what becomes viral in western media. And, for any specific issue, there's a strong bias towards western liberal consensus when picking the side. These a very serious fundamental issues. The best defense I see here is that of pluralism: almost everybody is biased, but different parties are biased in different ways, and having more independent voices helps. The voice of Rust project, while it might be biased, is definitely independent.

If we do want to make political statements, I am strongly in favor of keeping the current practice of using a short paragraph in release announcement for this. That's the main power of the message, that the issue is so important that we want to use part of the professional attention for it. Making a separate announcement dilutes this. It also would force us to give a longer, more nuanced take on any specific issue, and I don't think Rust teams are well equipped to make nuanced analysis of political topics: this is a really hard thing to do. Obviously, non-nuanced take has a chance of being "wrong", that's the side bias I've talked above.

As for the process, the current one, "broad 'core team' decides", feels right to me. I trust the teams to handle communication in a good way the same way I trust the teams to make adequate technical decisions. And discussions like the present one are a way to calibrate the leadership based on the broad community sentiment. Adding a more explicit "by line" for such situations feels right to me: the statement is made by the leadership of the project, but we, as a community, can ask the leadership to course-correct.

So, TL;DR

  • We should be consistent
  • I am personally undecided about general "do" or "don't", but the combined pluralism, independence, and bubble orthogonality features make me lean towards "do"
  • If the answer is "do", than I think the current process of adding a statement to the release feels like the right one.

As a disclosure, I did suggest changing the latest release notes in light of the events in Ukraine.

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Invoking the "silent majority" is itself a political maneuver that was popularized and deployed primarily by right-wing political parties over the last century, especially since Nixon, to refer to the fact that they deliberately represented the hegemonic demographic segment, without explicitly saying something that might be viewed as... uncouth if put into plainer words.

Now, I am not saying you are deliberately trying to say the same thing. No, I think it's been in the "meme soup" for quite some time, and by now quite a lot of people from various walks of life and very... different political persuasions have used that phrase. I simply assume it came naturally to you without that inherently reflecting on your goals. But I would invite you to pause to reflect on the way the world puts us in these positions of absurdity, where the words that come to us to ask others to step away from speaking about political matters primarily stem from political campaign slogans.

Frankly, I might also like to escape primarily political concerns and simply enjoy the benefits of technology, untroubled by politics. Alas, the desire to do so is both itself a political concern and also besieged by politics on all sides. Indeed, the Rust project already receives massive criticism for associating with people who would like to enjoy such benefits of technology (e.g. hormone replacement therapy regimens) without concern of politics (e.g. being harassed by government authorities for having used such and thus no longer matching certain claims government documentation has made about them without their consent).

So yes, I am quite sympathetic to the desire to escape political concerns... when it also comes from voices who also would have my back in escaping the aforementioned political concerns. But... that itself is politics. It's quite annoying, isn't it? And this has in fact tied my fate with that of at least one person in Ukraine, though I am afraid I am disinclined to go too far into the details because of... ah yes, more concerns about political repression. You see? It keeps happening.

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The problem is you cannot ask for it and professional attention means nothing when the issue is beyond the profession. Rust language is a programming language, and it can do nothing beyond programming. Note that I am not saying Rust community cannot do anything about it. If you are urging for community attention, then like what I suggest, make a community announcement (or anything like that).

Since you know it is hard to say and it's nuanced, then nobody should expect a quick action can do it right. What will you do if a technical problem is really difficult? Will you resort to an ad-hoc fix that probably works for now or will you think about it for a bit longer? Rust teams are not well equipped to make nuanced analysis of political topics, then equip them instead of getting around with it, right?

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Sorry to say, but this thread has run its course. The points that have come in the more recent hours have been derivatives of older points. Very little of the discourse here has been productive.

Thank you all for staying as civil as you have been.

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