 Okay, so if you've ever been to Von Desk, I believe everyone do. You see a poster of Enrico Zini, because I was going to promote Defconn 18 in Taipei, and was making a poster. I searched through photos I have taken in Defconn 17, and found a talk from Enrico Zini, which was conceptually doing things together. And the original quote of the poster was, Debbie is, what? A relationship between multiple people. Debbie is the relationship between multiple people. So, and I believe it is the worst. This talk is the continuity about this session. So, that's welcome. You have multiple people Enrico Zini. Thank you. Hello. I'm Enrico Zini, Debian developer, account manager, person. I want to talk about diversity. Multiple people are diverse people. And so, it says at the entrance, Debbie is a relationship between multiple people. I grew up in a small town, and being different was not allowed. If one was different, then it attracted education, like when you educate somebody who's left-handed to become right-handed, which still happens in Italy. It attracted well-meaning concern. It attracted bullying. Everybody knew everyone, so there was no escape. Like now, let me say, with Facebook and the internet, you have your own bubble where you can escape. And it's not a reality, but kind of you cut your own comfort zone of people that work for you. There was no chance of that. There was only one bubble, and it was the village. So, I had to learn from a very young age the skill of making myself accepted by my group of peers. It was an essential survival strategy. If I was not part of one group or of the group, it meant that the group could define itself as not like me, and I would face the consequences. So, diversity was not allowed. So, it says at the entrance, Debbie is a relationship between multiple people. And Debian is where I learned diversity. It was one of the first opportunities for me to directly experience it. In Debian, I could begin to exist. I could experience the value and pleasure of diversity, including my diversity. I am extremely grateful to all of you for that. I love that, and this talk is also a big thank you to you all for that. It says at the entrance, Debian is a relationship between multiple people. Multiple people doesn't mean being all the same kind of person, all doing the same kind of things. Each and every single one of us is a different individual, and each of us brings their own unique creativity to Debian. So, let's understand multiple people or try, and I don't know, we can categorize. How do you categorize a person? How do you categorize a package? Like we have sections and depth tags. And with people, normally there's binary definitions, like good, bad, smart, stupid, pretty, ugly, white, not white, whatever all the rest for the white people is. Strange, other. Rich poor from here or immigrant, not nerd, nerd, straight, gay, cis, trans, polite, impolite, left handed, right handed. It all boils down to like me, unlike me. It's a definition of like this is like me, that person is not like me, I'm scared. And that's like, and then one can get a bit more involved and it's like labels. Straight, gay, be, cis, trans, Caucasian, whatever. And it again, it's kind of like me, unlike me, with a bit more precision. But then there's another way, and like labels are a bit like package sections. And then there's another way, which is a bit like depth tags, which is a spectrum. Spectrum is like a continuity of different colors. And there's many spectra, I hate it when English does Latin for plural, it sounds so elitist, but apparently the plural of spectrum is spectra, so let's be elitist, sorry. So it's like axis in a multi-dimensional space and each spectrum is an axis. So you have, for example, the spectrum of gender, the spectrum of sexual preference, the spectrum of neurodiversity, of skin color, of sexual attraction, of race, of wealth, that there's a lot of these and they are continuum. Like I'm going to show examples of spectrum in a moment, but basically we classify packages better than we classify people at the moment. There's very little general understanding of taking in the diversity of people. So I would like to present spectra, so where you take a range of people and then you kind of decompose it along one axis. I'm going to show a few examples and I chose them not because they're more or less important than others, but because they have been particularly relevant to me recently, so it's easier for me to talk about them. This is not by all means exhaustive, it's not by all means like top 10 or anything, it's just what I've recently cared about and I feel more like talking than other things for which I don't really feel like I can represent. And while I talk about this, if you wonder where you are in each spectrum, know that every place is okay. Think about who you are, not about who you should be. This is very important, you should be who you are. So first spectrum, gender identity, is that readable? Ish. So basically the idea, so gender is like man, woman, roughly and a lot in between and outside of that. So there's this interesting graphical thing that this splits three different aspects of gender. One is identity, which is who I am and another is gender expression, which is how I look and the other is biological sex, which is how my bits look like. And the idea is that for gender identity you have two arrows, one for woman-ness and one for man-ness and then you put a dot on where you are on both arrows. For example, I'm very much the left on both. I don't identify either as a man or as a woman. But as of gender expression, I have a beard, so I would put somewhere along the line of masculine but I also have long hair, so maybe along the line of feminine. And maybe my posture, I don't know if it's masculine or feminine. As for biological sex, it's kind of my business, but that's kind of like I can look at myself in the mirror and put dots along those lines. So that's the idea that gender is not just man, woman, but it's a whole lot. It could be both. It could be one gender identity, another gender expression. Biological sex could be a mix. There's intersex people that have a biological sex which is neither and often have great problems because of that mostly coming in by society. So gender, a continuum. And then there's sexual orientation. It's a graph I like a lot, but I couldn't find a better resolution and didn't have time to... It's a table I like a lot. I didn't have time to redesign it properly. So sexual orientation is who I like. The general idea is straight, gay, but then there's LGBTQIA plus. Not all of these are orientations. Or you can mix and match prefixes and suffixes, so there's romantic attraction like I would like to cuddle and sexual attraction, which is I would like to do other things. And so one can be, say, homosexual and bi-romantic. I like to have sex with men, but I would like to cuddle with any person. Or, yeah, mix. That's another spectrum. It has nothing to do with gender. I can be agender, but actually with agender, almost an etero don't work because they're defined as the opposite of gender, right? So I can be like agender and andro-romantic, so liking men or agender and geno-romantic, like liking women. So there's relocatable prefixes and non-relocatable prefixes, which is kind of cute. So there. But I'm agender and I don't care that much about the gender of people, which means, which makes me bi- or pan-romantic and bi- or pan-sexual, but find your place. Then there's neurodiversity, skip that. Neurodiversity is diversity in the way I think. It's generally considered the autism spectrum, but it can be a bit broader. I would like to introduce neurodiversity using a text which is very dear to me, which talks about allism. And allism is is basically non-autism. So there's a person that wrote, there's a link there. It will be in the talk notes that I will put in my blog. A person wrote a beautiful text about allistic people, that is non-autistic people, written the way allistic people write about autism. So everything is medicalized and it's a problem. So the dysfunction is that the allistic person emotional state is not determined by their own thought processes, but instead it is borrowed from other people that are expressing emotions nearby. And that's another bit that I really liked. An allistic person learns subconsciously that they are dependent on others for their emotional experience. Consequently, they tend to develop the habit of manipulating social interaction in order to have from others expression of emotion that they will find pleasing. So it's like non-autistic people can't have emotions of their own, are dependent on others for emotions, and they tend to manipulate others to get the emotions that they would like. That's maybe a bit harsh. I wouldn't medicalize it like that, but it's really fun to read that text. But it got me thinking because that dysfunction for me was a very rational adaptation. I had to have an emotional experience that was compatible with the people around me for survival, and I could not say I want to do something different than you all to do something I wanted. I had to manipulate the group somewhat to also do something that I liked because the group would not allow me as a diverse person. So I learned to have a social mask. I learned to hide who I was. I never thought I were okay. And then I found out that there's a whole spectrum out there where I can belong. And it opened possibilities of growth. It's been great. If you go and read discussion about the autism spectrum, it tends to get medical, very medical, very fast. The DSM, which is the diagnostic whatever manual used officially for psychological diagnosis, and most Wikipedia actually refers to that, it gets often, that book often gets criticized for a tendency of turning diversity into mental health issues. There are people campaigning for considering the neurodiversity spectrum, not necessarily a disease or a problem. But I cannot speak for autistic people, although I recognize myself somewhat around the borders of that group. So I stick to my experience from my end of the spectrum. But there are various resources online to explore if you're interested in more. And then there's plenty of other spectra. Newbies and experts. And aren't we all newbies and experts on something or other? There's a whole range. You can't say that person is an expert. I hope you get the idea. And I want to move on to talk about how to deal with diversity. First is how to deal with how I try to deal with my diversity or how you could deal with your diversity. So this is a thought experiment. Let's all assume for a moment that each and every single one of us is okay. I am okay. You are okay. Me and you have been okay since the moment we were born. Being born is all me and you need to deserve to exist. You are okay and you will always be okay. Like every single person alive. I'm okay. You are okay. We are all okay. Let's start from this. Hold on to that thought for the next five, 10 minutes or for the rest of your life. That's also good. And let's see how, okay, we are okay. What next? Like no need to belong, make effort, like blend in, hide something that if they discover it, I'm out. Everything is fine. So suddenly I have a lot of energy. It's like, oh my God, I don't need to worry about so many things. What do I do with my time? So there's a whole world that opens up. First, I need to know myself. What do I like? What's my interest? What would I like to do? What do I know? What do I feel? What do I need? For the last two questions in my blog note, there's going to be an algorithm for finding out, which is pretty cool. And forget absolute truth. And center on my own experiences. Because if I think in terms of absolute truth, I digress into some theoretical thinking that has nothing to do with me. So I don't think Mapo Tofu is good. I think I like Mapo Tofu. That belongs to me. That's something about myself. Then as I start to know myself, I need to communicate and express myself. Otherwise I will always be alone or surrounded by people that believe I am something else and treat me as something else. So enjoy what I like. Do what I want to do. And grow up in the direction that I feel good. Study and practice what's my interest. And let myself lose among those people who can see me and respect me. And then find out where I can be myself. Being myself in some areas, among some groups, in some venues is dangerous. If we're going to have that in some other countries, I won't be giving this talk or maybe somebody would put me in jail. But where I can be myself, yay, finally I can. Choose wisely my friends. I choose wisely my partners. I look for groups of people that have similar interests. I take classes and courses in things that I find interesting. And that'd be an end up conf. And then I'm exposed to the world and I need to learn to protect myself. I am something precious for me. I'm all I have. I need to take good care. So I will make mistakes acting as myself, but a mistake does not invalidate me. As long as I think I did something wrong and I don't think I am wrong, most education that at least I received turned all the you did something wrong into you are wrong. It's not you didn't get it. It's you are stupid, right? I don't know if you had that experience. Does it resonate with any one of you? Right. There's a clear distinction there and it's extremely important. Because if I think I did something wrong, I can learn. If I think I am wrong, I can only disappear. And learn to know my boundaries. What is acceptable to me? What can come inside my space? Like physical boundaries, emotional boundaries. And recognize when they're being crossed. I spent mid-June doing a three-day series of workshops in which I practice telling people, stop. It's been one of the most important experiences in my life. Just being able to freely tell anyone, stop. Negotiate. It doesn't mean that if somebody crosses my boundaries, it's the end. But I can say, stop. And then let's figure out what you want. How can I give you that? Let's cooperate in our interaction. And I can use my anger to protect my integrity. When I'm being oppressed or violated, I feel anger. And anger is good and useful. As long as I express it in a way that works for me, I do not need to hurt others to protect myself. I can just say, stop. So yeah, that's some of my thoughts on how to deal with my diversity and then how to deal with the diversity of others. First of all, diversity is a good thing. But I cannot appreciate others without appreciating myself first. That's why I talked about dealing with my diversity before I talked about dealing with the diversity of others. Once I realized I could be okay in my diversity, it was easier and much more pleasant to appreciate the diversity of others. And opening to others doesn't need a sacrifice. I can try and make an effort to understand you without compromising who I am. It actually makes me grow. It makes me learn without killing a part of me. As long as I am able to know who I am, protect myself and so on. I can embrace my own identity without denying the identity of others. In order to be bisexual, I don't need to pick up a fight with every heterosexual and homosexual person out there. It's fine. Actually, I love them all. Or I might. I mean... Affirming me doesn't mean destroying you. If I feel I'm right, it doesn't mean that you are wrong. And I would like to repeat it. Think about the last flamers in Debbie and DeVell and I would like to repeat. If I feel I'm right, it doesn't mean that you are wrong. So out of the deal with the diversity of others, curiosity is a good default. If you don't know what to do, be curious. It's fun. It's like going from, why do you do that to... Why do you do that? I would like to know. I am curious. I never thought about that. It feels weird to me. I'm learning something new. Cool. Do not make assumptions. Because if you assume better than a person is, you'll be disappointed. And if you assume worse than a person is, you will miss some of that person. Connect with the person. Connection is... like... hands shaking, full duplex, bidirectional, flow of information between people. For me, the opposite of connection is creepiness. It's when one person has a... monodirectional communication and doesn't take in anything from the other person. Interact with people, not things. You don't need to grow minions to exploit. And people are much more interesting. I mean... If you don't have the energy for all this, take a step back, protect yourself. You don't have to come back the next day or say, this is not for me right now. It's okay. Listen to my red flags. Something I needed to pay attention to. A red flag is when something happens and something in my brain goes, I'm not comfortable about this. And there's a lot of overlooking those red flags saying maybe I'm too picky or I'm being too strict or something. But something happened that made me uncomfortable. It's worth paying attention. It doesn't mean that I need to act, but it's those kind of signals that can make me understand the situation better, start to realize that some boundary of mine is being violated and I'm not realizing it. Choose my involvement. I don't... Well, that was my talk last year, right? I don't need to do everything all the time. I don't need to do what I don't want to do. And choose again. Dan Simmons funds. Thank you. And choose again. You don't have to commit to your choice at all times. At any point, you can revoke your consent, you can change your mind, you can grow, you can be another person if you feel better like that. Choose again. There are limits to accepting diversity and tolerance. Thankfully, Popper thought about that, so I can just relay the information. I find it quite good as a general idea for limits of tolerance. And Popper talked about the paradox of tolerance. This is a summary of the summary that Wikipedia makes of it. And basically, if a society is tolerant without limits, their ability to be tolerant will eventually be seized or destroyed by the intolerant. So in order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must be intolerant of intolerance, right? I mean, you get, say, fascists in Italy saying you are saying that fascism is illegal, you are repressing my freedom of speech. Yeah, but your freedom of speech is the intolerant bit over here. What you're saying is that people, some categories of people need to be short. And that is not acceptable. So yes, I am intolerant of that. That is pretty much the only thing I need to be tolerant of. That is pretty much the only thing I am intolerant of. And then, use diversity for growth. Diversity empowers. So there's a spectrum, right? Multiple spectra. A whole multi-dimensional landscape of a continuity of things. And if I identify where I am in that landscape, it gives me more awareness about myself. Identifying where I am shows me steps I may be interested in making. Identity can change, evolve, move along these. To the point that I like the idea of talking about my identity in the past tense. I'm not used to, but when I remember to do it I feel really good. So yeah, so far I've been bisexual and agender. That may change. And seeing where other people are in this landscape shows me also a path from me to the other people. I can connect through that path. We're not separate islands with chasms of ski and sharks in between. I can see for which way you're coming from. Maybe you give me an idea and it's like, hey, I like that about you and you're there and I'm here. How about I go here? Does it feel better? Maybe not. Maybe yeah. Actually yeah. Or maybe not today. I don't know. It's fluid. Appreciating diversity allows to grow. So I'm happy I started to see myself as part of spectra. Like I'm in the gender trans spectrum at least as far as not needing to follow gender expectations. Probably more. I'm in the autism spectrum at least as far as not needing to follow social expectations. Possibly more. I'm in the asexual spectrum. There's also an asexual spectrum. Different people have different amount of obsession for sex and I feel like I'm somewhere in the asexual spectrum at least as far as not seeing other people as sexual objects. I like sex very much but I don't look at one of you thinking I would really want to do that with you. I don't know. Sex for me is something that comes from a connection and needs a presence of both. A person I don't know is an individual, not my sexual idea or something. Once I mean I'm free to move. Yeah, I can reason. See other possibilities. And take control of my narrative. What is my narrative? How do I see myself? What's my story? If there were a movie about me what would it look like? Would be weird. Would be fun. Do I like it? And does my narrative tell me what I'm going to like next year or in five years? If it does, it might be a problem. Seriously? Yes, seriously. Okay, so how about Debian? Let's come to now that I gave introduction a bit more to the point. Imposter syndrome I think is relevant to this. So I enter a new group. Am I good enough for this group? How will that group perceive my identity? What's the expectation I perceive from that group? Like I need to be really smart to be a Debian developer or something. And since well, since my childhood I really needed to work to belong to a group I have like almost constant imposter syndrome. I had or something, like at some point I got annoyed and I invested in like six months of psychotherapy to work through what was wrong and I found out that I needed to give up that need to work to belong. And then I realized it was written at the beginning of the Debian diversity statement. No matter how I identify myself or how others perceive me I am welcome as long as I interact constructively. And then this is relevant to Debian in my opinion to have the ability to grow, evolve, change, adapt, create. There's this quotation from Vonnegut where there's some aliens talking about people of Earth and how they couldn't tell between good ideas and bad ideas and eventually they've been all killed by bad ideas and it says that ideas on Earth were badges of friendship or enmity. Their content did not matter friends agreed with friends in order to express friendliness. Enemies disagreed with enemies in order to express enmity. The ideas that Earthlings held didn't matter for hundreds of thousands of years since they couldn't do much about them anyways. Ideas might as well be badges as anything. So yeah, like if my friends use Vim I would use Vim so I can say I'm friends with those who use Vim or something but we can do better than that in Debian. We can really have unique ideas. We are having ideas. Lots of people in Debian are having ideas. That is good. Keep your identity in the group. I think Debian is a place where a personal identity matters more than belonging in prefixed social norms and that is a big wealth of Debian. If Debian changes because Debian evolves and it was 10 and then 10, I'm confused. If Debian changes and you keep having your identity, you can choose whether that change is part of you or not or stay where you are, go along but you represent yourself and that means Debian can grow. It doesn't move, it extends because you keep being the part of Debian that you care for. If Debian moves in a direction you don't want, you keep being in charge of your bit. Whereas if your identity is a function of the group identity you become a control freak trying to avoid any change because any change in Debian will make you what you do not want to be. Say and so when something happens that changes, can I adapt to that? Do I have the energy to do it? Do I allow myself to ask for help? There's a lot of stuff in Debian that happens changes in the policy new packaging tools it's a constant learning maybe I don't have the energy for that learning I can go to someone some friend, some Debian developer who I'm comfortable with and say teach me about this. Then there's the social contact so us and our users are at a diverse ecosystem free software is also a diverse ecosystem which grows there's new languages and new upstream communities that come up all the time and the idea is free software changes all the time if you've been yesterday to it's a free software issue you had some idea but in the past I mean it used to be that the compiler was free software and then the curtain was free software and now we bought about firmware being free software and then we'll get to open hardware and network protocols and server code even the very idea of free software grows and Debian grows with it necessarily so yeah as people do Debian exists in a diverse and constantly changing upstream ecosystem so everything about appreciating and dealing with the diversity of others and the diversity of oneself that I said can be extended to what is the identity of Debian what are the identities of Debian and what is the diversity of Debian and what is the diversity of the rest of the free software ecosystem where we are how do we move so appreciate diversity because there's always something you don't know or don't understand and there will be more in the future I wonder if it's possible to still know all of Debian I don't think I can know about every package that is in Debian I don't think I can know all the programming languages that are used by Debian packages I think so and in the future I will know even less if we are successful we are going to get even bigger and more complex we are technically complex and diverse we are socially complex and diverse and we got to learn to deal with that because we are awesome and we got to learn to deal with that too and I would like to close with with getting out of this and with a thank you to the Debian diversity statement that I think is basically saying everything that I just said in Debian we have a diversity statement that I adore I adore the diversity statement I adore the conversation that created this this was a month thread a month long thread on Debian project with not a flame war it's amazing look it up I'll try to remember to put a link to it on my slides it started very long as a proposal for diversity statement and it came down to something that to me is beautifully essential and it says that the Debian project welcomes and encourages participation by everyone no matter how you identify yourself or how others perceive you we welcome you we welcome contributions from everyone as long as they interact constructively with our community while much of the work for our project is technically nature we value and encourage contributions from those with expertise in other areas and welcome them in our community I'm really happy we have this I'm really happy to be among you I'm really happy to be here thank you I'm not sure if there's time for questions find me in the corridors if you want to talk about something I will be overwhelmed but I'll do my best team there's question time or and and okay thank you