The Ethics of Unpaid Labor and the Free/Libre Open Source Software Community
"As the people who exist within this supposed meritocracy don’t exist within a vacuum, we also have to realize how our actions affect others. Meritocracy creates a hierarchy amongst the people within it. Some of those at the top or striving to at least be above other people have been guilty of using their power for bullying, harassment, and sexist/racist/*ist language that they use against others directly and indirectly. This creates an atmosphere where people who would otherwise be deemed meritorious within this system choose not to participate because of a hostile, unrewarding environment.
A lot of people hold the idea of meritocracy close. I believe they mean well, too, but don’t they aren’t necessarily seeing the whole picture. We all want a system where we feel we can be rewarded for what we contribute: that society’s injustice toward certain groups of people - most specifically geeks, many of us who grew up feeling abused, persecuted, and ignored (blog post coming on this soon) - would be rendered irrelevant. In striving for that, our community has become a microcosm of society at large.
The idea of a meritocracy presumes that everyone starts off and continues through with the same level of access to opportunity, time, and money, which is unfortunately not the case. It’s a romanticized ideal - a belief in which at best ignores and at worst outright dismisses the experiences of everyone outside the group with the most access to these things. A certain demographic of people have three or four steps above other people, so the playing field is not even.”
http://ashedryden.com/blog/the-ethics-of-unpaid-labor-and-the-oss-community
"As the people who exist within this supposed meritocracy don’t exist within a vacuum, we also have to realize how our actions affect others. Meritocracy creates a hierarchy amongst the people within it. Some of those at the top or striving to at least be above other people have been guilty of using their power for bullying, harassment, and sexist/racist/*ist language that they use against others directly and indirectly. This creates an atmosphere where people who would otherwise be deemed meritorious within this system choose not to participate because of a hostile, unrewarding environment.
A lot of people hold the idea of meritocracy close. I believe they mean well, too, but don’t they aren’t necessarily seeing the whole picture. We all want a system where we feel we can be rewarded for what we contribute: that society’s injustice toward certain groups of people - most specifically geeks, many of us who grew up feeling abused, persecuted, and ignored (blog post coming on this soon) - would be rendered irrelevant. In striving for that, our community has become a microcosm of society at large.
The idea of a meritocracy presumes that everyone starts off and continues through with the same level of access to opportunity, time, and money, which is unfortunately not the case. It’s a romanticized ideal - a belief in which at best ignores and at worst outright dismisses the experiences of everyone outside the group with the most access to these things. A certain demographic of people have three or four steps above other people, so the playing field is not even.”
http://ashedryden.com/blog/the-ethics-of-unpaid-labor-and-the-oss-community