I previously wrote about the case for a Basic Income in Australia [1]. Since then I read an interesting article by Rutger Bregman in the Dutch site The Correspondent discussing the benefit that such Basic Income schemes have given in various places [2], he makes a great case for giving a Basic Income to poor people. However I believe that it should be provided to everyone. I believe that government payments shouldn’t be “means tested” because the proportion of the population who earn more than the cutoff is usually very small (IE it doesn’t save much money), because the money will be recovered from wealthy people in tax, and because the bureaucracy involved in determining who is eligible involves spending tax money to pay bureaucrats and costing everyone time in dealing with the process.

The concept of an Attention Economy has been getting some interest recently. But discussions of it seem to be mostly concerned with the needs of fairly wealthy people, how to advertise to them, how to filter out unwanted ads for them, etc. But the costs in attention can be even worse for people on low incomes or social security because they have many attention costs that could be solved by money. Many common essential purchases (EG soap, basic foods, and purely functional clothes) can become difficult decisions if saving a few dollars is important. The amount of thought involved in buying such items can result in someone who’s not well off having little energy to concentrate on other things. I think that to have an effective social security system we need to consider how much cognitive effort is being required of people who are receiving benefits.

Last month I wrote yet another review of mobile phone plans in Australia [3]. Every time I do this it takes a significant amount of time because the Telcos devise overly complex plans to make it difficult to compare their offerings. It seems that they aim to make their offerings somewhat competitive if you can interpret them but confusing enough to allow many (most?) of their customers to pay needlessly high bills. I could just pick a random telco and pay whatever it takes, spending an extra $10 or $20 per month isn’t such a big deal for me. Even though I advise a number of my relatives on the cheapest phone plan it’s probably only barely saving enough money to be worth the effort, a major motivation for me is being stubborn and not wanting telcos to rip people off.

The Importance of Mobile Phones

A mobile phone seems to be essential for most people. Mobile phones are used for making medical appointments and for applying for work, so in almost every case some of the financial assistance paid to a job seeker or person on a disability pension will go towards mobile phone costs. The aims of the social security benefits seem to clearly involve a phone service. Given that most people who receive social security payments spend some of that money on mobile phone bills the government has a direct financial interest in not having such money wasted on needlessly expensive phone plans. As we also don’t want to have people on social security spending time and attention trying to find the best phone plan it makes sense to have the government help manage this process.

Good communications is regarded as essential to education and economic development. A huge amount of taxpayer money was spent on the NBN (and then wasted by Tony Abbott when he cancelled the original plans) for these benefits.

Good phone access is also an issue of personal safety. While it is possible to call emergency services from a mobile phone that doesn’t have a valid SIM there are probably few people who keep a spare phone charged for that purpose. Also there are a variety of issues that can impact life or health which can best be resolved by calling friends or relatives.

Free Phones

I think that the best solution to these problems is for the government to directly pay mobile phone bills. If we are going to have a Basic Income then the government should make the base payment for mobile phone calls for every resident, if not then the government should make the base payment for everyone who receives any form of social security payment. Obviously the amount of data that could be transferred over a 3G network is greatly in excess of the amount that any plans allow and offering true “unlimited” calling leads to people using mobile phones as baby-monitors, so some limits are necessary. But the government could cheaply pay for a phone plan that exceeds the requirements of most people and then allow anyone who wants more data or calls to pay extra.

Which Plan?

The cheapest all-inclusive mobile phone plan in recent times was Kogan who charged $299 per annum for 6G of data per month and “unlimited” calls. The cheapest current offer for “unlimited” calls seems to be Lebara’s $30 per month offer which includes 2G of data.

My observation is that people who use 3G Internet just for phone use (as opposed to tethering a laptop or providing home Internet), who use a home Wifi network for installing Android programs and don’t play Ingress tend to use a lot less than 1G of data per month. I would use between 400M and 700M per month if I wasn’t playing Ingress and didn’t use my phone as a Wifi access point.

In terms of call volume, 600 minutes a month should be enough to cover the basic needs of most people judging by the number of plans on offer with limits smaller than that.

As a current Lebara offer is $30 per month for “unlimited” calls and 2G of data (and there are similar offers from other telcos), it should be possible for a telco to offer 600 minutes of calls and 1G of data for less than $15 per month. When the government is paying (no bad debts) and many of the users will use much less than the quota such a plan should be profitable at $10 per month or less.

Implementation

The way to implement this would be to start with a tender that has a hard requirement for the minimum amount of service provided. This would include the number of minutes per month for calls, the number of SMS sent, and the amount of data transfer. To avoid excessive billing (a standard telco scam) there should be a requirement that fees for extra use not exceed some small multiple of the base rate, for example if the government was paying $10 for 600 minutes of calls and 1G of data the excess usage charges could be capped at 3 cents per meg and 5 cents per minute (3* the base rate) which would be profitable for the telco but not a scam.

If the telcos act in a market driven competitive manner they will compete to provide the most attractive offerings for $10 per month.

If the build cost of the NBN had been invested at government bond rates (for any of the rates used for current bonds) then it would pay for the mobile phone bills for every resident forever, so the cost of providing phones for everyone is in the range of government telecommunications programs. If people who are working were to pay an extra $10 in tax and people who are on social security had their benefits reduced by $10 then that would be a great deal if it saved them the $20 or more that most people spend on a basic phone plan.

Government Phone Delays

A friend who’s a single mother pays for an “unlimited” mobile phone plan because calls to the social security office are usually kept on hold for more than an hour. It’s likely that she could save money over the course of a year by paying for a cheaper plan and just dealing with the occasional big bill, but she needs to budget carefully and feels that she can’t take that risk. It seems stupid that government phone delays (partly caused by cutting funds for staff) cause increased expenses for people who are receiving social security payments. If the government implemented a smart queuing system that allowed them to call people back instead of making them wait on hold then it would save money overall.

So there are obviously other ways that the government can save money on phone calls and time for everyone.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2013/12/08/basic-income-australia/
• [2] http://tinyurl.com/jwj5ahe
• [3] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2014/04/01/comparing-telcos-again/

One topic that often gets discussed when it’s near election time is whether clubs and societies should be “political”. Some organisations are limited in what they can do, for example in some jurisdictions religious organisations can theoretically lose their tax exempt status if they advocate for one party. In practice any organisation that has a wide membership will have a variety of political views represented so a policy of directly supporting one candidate or party is likely to lose some members.

A common practice among some clubs is to send questionnaires to parties before elections. This might cause a policy change in the parties that do whatever it takes to get votes (as opposed to the parties who devise policy based on principle). But it also provides members a list of how the parties compare on the basis of the criteria that matter to the club.

I think that organisations such as Linux Australia [1] and the Linux Users of Victoria [2] should send such questionnaires and publish an analysis of the results. I previously suggested a few questions that could be asked [3], the last one received some negative comments for being too tabloid but the others got some agreement. But obviously there would need to be some discussion about which questions are in scope and how they should be asked. Such a discussion would take a while and would need to be started well before an election was called, I think if we start now we should be able to get it done before the next federal election is called.

There is one Australian political party that has a consistent record of having IT policies that are in line with the general aims of Linux Australia and which also has policies that meet the social standards that are generally agreed by most of the membership (EG opposing discrimination). But I know that there are some members of the Linux community who advocate various forms of discrimination and would vote accordingly so advocating for that party would get some negative reactions. But if someone wants to vote for a party that advocates discrimination against minority groups I don’t think that there’s any harm in providing information to allow them to vote for a pro-discrimination party that has a reasonable IT policy. In any case it doesn’t seem likely that we can get most of the membership of an organisation like Linux Australia to agree on what parties are unacceptable, so sending a questionnaire to all parties avoids that debate.

I would like to see this sort of thing done by LUGs for all state and territory elections. I will be involved in the process with LUV for the Victorian elections, but I have to just hope that my blog posts inspire people in other states and territories – if anyone has already started on this then please let me know. I will also be involved with getting this done for the federal elections with Linux Australia, hopefully this post will help get people interested in that.

• [1] http://linux.org.au/
• [2] http://luv.asn.au/
• [3] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2009/03/17/lobbying-for-free-software/

There has been a lot of discussion recently about the concept of a Basic Income (Wikipedia), largely due to the efforts to change the Swiss constitution to provide a Basic Income [1]. The concept of a Basic Income is that residents get a fixed payment without having to be sick, disabled, looking for work, or eligible for other forms of social security.

A Basic Income wouldn’t replace all other forms of social security, one of the most obvious examples is that sick people will often need money for medical care in additional to living expenses. Also I believe that it shouldn’t be means tested in any way. I think that one of the problems with current payment schemes is that there are complex eligibility criteria which require effort for the applicant and for government agencies to prevent accidental or fraudulent over-payment. The tax rates could be raised slightly to make it revenue neutral.

Newstart

In Australia the main form of social security for unemployed people at the moment is called “Newstart” [2]. Currently Newstart payments range from a maximum of $501 per fortnight for a single person ($13,026 per annum), to a maximum of $699.90 per fortnight for someone who is a carer.

The Newstart payments start to decrease if the recipient earns more than $62 per fortnight. The minimum wage in Australia is $16.37 per hour for permanent work or $20.30 for casual work [3]. So if someone works for more than 3 hours at a casual rate (and I can’t imagine 4 hours a fortnight being anything other than casual) then their Newstart payments will decrease. The payment decreases are fairly significant, for every dollar that is earned about 50 cents will be deducted from the payments. That’s a great incentive to either avoid opportunities to do part-time work or to do cash-only work that’s outside the tax system.

The most obvious way of implementing a Basic Income would be to replace Newstart. Then anyone who is in that situation would be free to just not get a job – which would be OK IMHO as people who don’t want to work probably wouldn’t do a good job if the government forced them to get a job. People who are unemployed who want to work could work as much as they want and scale up according to what their employer asks and how much money they need.

Currently the full-time minimum wage is $622.20 per week (I’m not sure exactly how they get that from $16.37). That’s almost 2.5* the Newstart allowance for a single person (but less than twice the Newstart allowance for a carer). While Newstart (and the other forms of social security) don’t provide a great income, it seems that the difference between Newstart and the minimum wage isn’t that great – particularly when you consider that working involves some expenses for travel etc. There doesn’t seem to be a great financial incentive for someone to leave Newstart and get a minimum wage job.

People Who Want Social Security

Some people think it’s great to get government payments while others find it embarrassing to need such payments and won’t necessarily apply if they are eligible. I think that the current system of forcing people to apply for social security is a way of discouraging people who find themselves unexpectedly in a difficult situation but doesn’t discourage people who are happy not to work. This seems to effectively reduce the incidence of payments to the people who most tax-payers would regard as the most worthy recipients.

Economics

Charles Stross wrote about some ideas related to this [4]. He suggests that as the workforce participation has been steadily reducing due to technology we should move to a social model that isn’t based around working to live but working to buy luxuries that aren’t covered by the Basic Income.

One of the many economic changes related to a Basic Income is that the minimum wage could be smaller than it might otherwise be. For example if the minimum wage was decreased by the same amount that the Basic Income provided then the minimum income would remain the same while employers would pay less, this would affect the viability of certain types of contract work web sites if they were subject to minimum wage laws (currently they just ignore the minimum wage laws by paying based on job completion instead of hours worked). I don’t think that the minimum wage should decrease that much though, currently employers are able to run viable businesses with the minimum wage laws and I don’t think that a Basic Income should be used as a way of helping corporations avoid paying their employees.

If we had a Basic Income then there’s many ways that it could be used to stabilise the economy. If people could pay their rent even if they lost their job then a down-turn in one area of the economy wouldn’t immediately affect other areas. Also if rent payments were deducted automatically from an account used to receive the Basic Income then landlords would be more likely to rent to poor people as they could be guaranteed to receive rent payments (it would be easy to have a contractual agreement for rent to take priority and have bank computers enforce that).

The Implementation Problem

I don’t think that my idea would have any significant negative effects. It wouldn’t decrease government revenues if tax was adjusted accordingly. It wouldn’t make people stop working as people who don’t want to work already avoid it. It would help people who are out of work to get work by reducing the barriers to entry in terms of paperwork and of unreasonable cuts to Newstart making it bad value to take part time work.

I think that the big problem with implementing it is people who want to prevent poor people from having opportunities. They want to reduce social security and minimum wages even though such changes will in the long run only give less tax revenue and greater expense in law enforcement. It seems rather ironic that such hostility often comes from people at the low end of the middle class whos jobs are most likely to be at risk from new technology.

As on-going technological development reduces the number of workers that are required to keep things running we need to have some form of payment to the people who aren’t doing enough work to survive. A decent Basic Income is a much better option than giving Newstart payments and forcing a significant portion of the population into a degrading search for jobs that don’t exist. As that’s the inevitable future I think we should make political changes to deal with it sooner rather than later. However a Basic Income might be implemented now it’s surely going to be a lot better than what might happen if we wait until the majority of the population are unemployed before doing something about it.

• [1] http://tinyurl.com/mwemen5
  
• [2] http://www.humanservices.gov.au/customer/services/centrelink/newstart-allowance
• [3] http://www.fairwork.gov.au/PAY/NATIONAL-MINIMUM-WAGE/pages/default.aspx
• [4] http://tinyurl.com/mjq3dwl

There’s been an ongoing news issue related to the NSA that I’m not going to directly comment on, Charles Stross has one of the more interesting comments about it [1]. One of his major points is that any success at government secrecy relies on the type of work environment that existed 40+ years ago. Corporatism has killed government secrecy – now it’s a matter of time before corporate whistle-blowers start seriously leaking documents.

One article that Charles links to is an interesting and insightful blog post Adam Curtis wrote for the BBC about the many failures of MI5 [2]. I think that everyone is aware of their biggest failures but from Adam’s article it seems that they have only failed and never succeeded in anything. I wonder whether ASIO is any better, it’s probably not (the Wikipedia page notes the involvement of MI5 in creating ASIO). It seems that the best way of achieving the goals of ASIO and MI5 would be to disband those organisations and assign regular police to do such work, after all it’s been proven that British police are better at catching spies than MI5.

• [1] http://tinyurl.com/l99ylzp
• [2] http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/posts/BUGGER

Seven hours ago I was handing out how to vote cards for the Greens at the 2013 Australian Federal election. I was hoping that either we would have a Labor/Greens coalition or an outright majority for Labor. Unfortunately we got a Liberal majority in the lower house and it looks like some extreme right wing groups may get into the senate (replacements for “Family First” – the anti-Gay party).

For some reason the polling station where I was working only had volunteers from the three major parties (Greens, Labor, and Liberal) while other polling stations in the same electorate had volunteers from smaller parties such as the Sex Party and the Socialist Alliance.

The volunteers from the Liberal party ate McDonalds outside the polling station and afterwards McDonalds rubbish was left on the ground, the above picture isn’t particularly clear because I took it after 6PM when the polls closed. The Liberals didn’t care enough to put their rubbish in a bin, it’s an externality for them, if they get enough seats in the senate they will surely take the same approach to governing Australia. The Labor people didn’t take the effort to clean up the Liberal mess even though it wasn’t particularly difficult to do so, I think that’s the type of attitude that led to this election defeat. In the case of the McDonalds rubbish in question I put it in the bin so that when the primary school kids return on Monday their school won’t be too messy after the election. But in the case of the mess that is being made in Australian politics it will take many more Greens votes to allow us to clean it up.

Today I was in the center of Melbourne and I saw two stands run by Muslims advocating their faith. They had a selection of DVDs and brochures to give away and seemed friendly enough for anyone who wanted a chat. I think that this is a good thing, if the majority of the Australian population would think of the Muslim minority as people who give away DVDs rather than as potential suicide bombers then it would be a great benefit for society.

Then I saw a Christian stand which had placards indicating that Jesus loves Muslims, which is fine. One of the workers on that stand then gleefully told me that there had been a Muslim stand in that area but the Muslims departed when they arrived. It would be good if advocates for the various religions could work together to promote positive things that they all agree on (generally related to being nice to other people). When they seem to be essentially bullying other religious groups into leaving the area they aren’t making a good case for a kind and caring god.

The Christian who was so happy about the Muslims departing then tried to convert me. He started by talking about a mobile phone not being able to appear from nothing which was the start of an utterly stupid argument about creationism. That was stupid firstly because it’s obvious that evolution doesn’t apply to consumer electronics, if I leave a phone lying on top of another phone overnight I’m not going to get some little phones appearing as a result.

But the bigger stupidity is in even promoting creationism in the first place. Advocating creationism is essentially claiming that god is so incapable that ze can’t manage an evolutionary process. An all-seeing all-knowing god of infinite intelligence could just create a plasma cloud that will form into a solar system and evolve life. People who argue for creationism don’t believe in a capable god, they believe in a being that resembles a god in the way a “magician” resembles someone who can actually perform magic. Arguing for creationism is arguing for a limited being which probably isn’t worthy of worship (why worship space aliens who are probably only a few thousand years ahead of us). Regardless of the scientific evidence (which is strongly in favor of evolution) just logically thinking about the issue in regard to what a being with infinite powers might actually do suggests that ze could just as easily create or evolve all life and probably wouldn’t care about what we believe. Genesis should be taken as metaphor because it’s obvious that nothing that’s taught in a year 7 science class could be taught to your typical stone age goat-herd, but even if it was taken literally it’s not specified as a required belief (as opposed to a belief in a single god, repenting sins, and other beliefs which are required).

The greatest stupidity however is the fact that even if it made any sense to promote creationism it wouldn’t make sense to do so immediately. Any time you want to convert someone to a set of beliefs it’s a good strategy to start with the ones which will seem least wacky. I can have have a conversation with Christians about positive things which we generally agree on such as donating to charity and trying to do good things in various ways. But when they start with the stupid stuff I walk away.

When the weather is better I plan to interview representatives of the various religious groups who are trying to convert people on the street and rate them according to how wacky they are. I’ll be a little limited in my ability to review them by the total lack of any right to free speech in Australia (our laws are much the same as those in the UK). But I should still be able to give them a reasonable review.

Rusty wrote an insightful post titled “What Can I Do To Help?” about reactions to new ideas [1]. He suggests that people make an effort to have a positive approach when someone talks about a new idea, it’s quite common for people to point out reasons why the new idea might not work out which is discouraging for the person who had the idea. I think that is a really good point. I probably haven’t done too well in that regard in the past and will try to do better in future.

Code Written by Assholes

Rusty previously wrote a post titled “If you didn’t run code written by assholes, your machine wouldn’t boot” which implies that we should just let assholes be assholes [2]. That doesn’t go well with his “What Can I Do To Help?” post. Note that I’m not accusing Rusty of hypocrisy here, giving advice to help people who want to get along well with others is not in contradiction with refraining from giving unsolicited advice and encouragement to difficult people who have expressed no interest in improving their behavior. A comment on the latter post by “Doctor Whom” says “If I had seen this kind of talk when I was a teenager, I would have thought twice about picking up coding“, presumably given the number of people who read Rusty’s blog there are some teenagers who experienced some discouragement towards a career in computers (or a hobby in FOSS) from Rusty’s post.

I’ve already written a response to the “If you didn’t run code written by assholes” post, among other things I suggested that people who are minor assholes should be assisted to be less difficult and major assholes should be excluded [3]. In that post I was working on the assumption that for every significant task that needs to be completed (such as making a popular OS bootable) someone will do it, if the person working on it disappears then someone else will take over – there is a community of programmers who will work on whatever needs to be done.

The Importance of Individuals

But in terms of new ideas it really comes down to individuals. Most projects which are significant and important now probably started out as one person or a small group who had an idea that seemed unlikely to succeed at the time. So while any big and successful project can have people replaced (which is among other things a requirement of long-term success) there are situations in which individuals with ideas matter.

Another important factor is that even ideas which turn out to be impractical are still useful. Someone who has an impractical idea about a technical issue and investigates it fully will learn a lot and may end up working on the less radical ways of solving similar problems – this is good for the individual and the community.

Another Way of Promoting Enthusiasm

In terms of promoting enthusiasm it seems that one thing that can be done by high profile people is to avoid writing posts like “If you didn’t run code written by assholes, your machine wouldn’t boot”. When people in positions of power and influence appear to have no interest in promoting good behavior it really discourages people who are vulnerable to the assholes – which among other things means most members of minority groups. Obviously Rusty could’t stamp out all asshole behavior, but if he announced a plan to try and make things better in that regard then it would help. It’s difficult to be enthusiastic when faced with discrimination from a minority and disinterest from the majority.

Of course with the way the Internet works I’m sure someone will say “what about the assholes who have great ideas, shouldn’t we nurture their enthusiasm by letting them keep doing asshole things?”. I think that for the major assholes this won’t be a problem, for example anyone who’s racist will be well aware that many people disagree strongly with them and thus won’t be particularly discouraged when they meet more people who disagree. For the minor assholes (people who don’t want to be assholes) it will be somewhat discouraging to be corrected, but that could be a learning experience for them that’s worth more than support in implementing their latest technical idea.

Update: Why Rusty is Important

In response to a comment by private mail I’ve added this section after publication.

Firstly I think that the opinions of all members of the community matter as they all affect the social environment which determines what types of behavior are encouraged and discouraged. But Rusty is more important than most people.

Firstly Rusty has a Wikipedia page [4], that alone is an objective criteria indicating his importance.

But in terms of influencing people in the FOSS community the most important things are that he’s a high profile Linux kernel programmer (which alone gives significant status and influence) and that he’s the founder of the first Linux conference in Australia (which is now known as Linux.conf.au AKA LCA). When issues such as the anti-harassment policy for LCA are being discussed any opinion that Rusty offered would be taken very seriously. But so far he doesn’t seem to be involved in any of the public discussions.

• [1] http://rusty.ozlabs.org/?p=282
• [2] http://rusty.ozlabs.org/?p=196
• [3] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2011/05/25/are-assholes-essential/
• [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rusty_Russell

Care2 has an interesting article about people being offended by a picture of a poor Afro-American boy using an iPad [1]. It seems that people object to poor people having what is in many ways the greatest educational tool available because it can also be seen as a status symbol. I wonder if one of the cheaper Android tablets (at 1/3 the price of an iPad or less) would get the same response.

Dvice has an inspiring article by Evan Ackerman about an experiment where a large quantity of Motorolla Xoom tablets were delivered to Ethiopian kids who couldn’t read and didn’t know English [2]. The kids learned printed English and learned to hack the devices to enable all the hardware features! I don’t expect that kids in first-world countries would get the same benefits as kids in countries such as the US and Australia are distracted by TV, games consoles, and other forms of entertainment that aren’t readily available in Ethiopian villages. But the potential benefits for widespread deployment of tablets in the poorer parts of first-world countries seems significant.

I think that the government of every first-world country should give a voucher to every resident who is more than two years old for a $100 discount off the list price of a tablet. If someone is happy with a cheap Android tablet then $100 will cover the prices. If they want something better then they can pay more. I’m happy for wealthy people to get a $100 discount on the price of one of the more expensive tablets, it seems that “means testing” such government subsidies just causes political issues without saving much money.

Apart from the obvious educational benefits for people who own tablets (which means adults as well as children) there are also benefits in having everyone own a tablet. If everyone owned a tablet then the resale price of a low-end tablet would approach zero and the resale price of even more desirable tablets such as the iPad would drop a lot. This would reduce the incentive to steal tablets and allow people to use them in situations where there is less safety. If most people felt safe to use a tablet computer on public transport and started doing educational things instead of reading newspapers then it would improve the overall education of the population. Newspapers generally aren’t educational and in the case of News Corp publications and other tabloids you can become less well informed by reading them – I believe that on average newspapers have a negative educational value in Australia.

The cost of giving a $100 tablet voucher to every resident of Australia would be about $2,200,000,000 (plus administrative costs) which seems like a lot of money. But when compared to the costs of building infrastructure it’s not significant. I’ve just read some government announcements regarding transport budget which includes items such as $6,500,000 to determine the best route for a new rail line. So if we were to get 350 new rail lines (and we need more than this) then merely determining the routes would cost as much as getting a tablet for everyone in the country!

• [1] http://www.care2.com/causes/why-is-the-us-so-insulted-by-welfare-queens.html
• [2] http://dvice.com/archives/2012/10/ethiopian-kids.php

After a lecture at LCA 2011 included some inappropriate slides there was a long discussion on several mailing lists about the issues related to this. In February 2011 I wrote a blog post debunking some of the bogus arguments in question [1]. Of course the matter didn’t end there, at LCA 2012 I was drawn into a few debates IRL about the issues, as long as there are more than a few men who want such porny pictures used in LCA talks the issue can’t be properly resolved.

The most serious aspect of the discussion in question is that of rape apology, the bad ideas that were presented have a real impact on the way people behave, merely making public statements saying that something is OK is going to increase the incidence of it happening. The Geek Feminism Wiki has a good page summarising the issue [2].

The Finally Feminism 101 post about Rape Culture is also worth reading in this context [3].

Recently Valeria Aurora wrote a post for the Ada Initiaive blog about the rape apology issue and how the community needs to act to prevent such behavior [4]. This inspired Matthew Garrett to write about the issue and state the position that “In the absence of an apology and explanation from Ted, I’ll be interacting with him to the bare minimum that I’m compelled to as a result of my job” [5]. I agree with Matthew’s article, everything he writes is logical and I believe that it is all for the benefit of the FOSS community as a whole. I think that most guys have quietly defriended guys who are rape-positive in the past (for example when I was 12 I refused to play D&D with boys who were raping NPCs). But blogging about it, explaining the problem, and giving the offender the possibility to reform is a good idea and it’s something that should be done more often.

Sam Varghese has written about the issue for ITWire [6]. He has taken the wrong approach to this, he specifically claims that “Matthew Garrett has kicked off what could be a damaging episode“. I think that Matthew’s approach is necessary and the situation demands it. If Matthew had been on holidays and I had read the TAI post earlier then I would probably have written a blog post which Sam could have described in a similar manner. So I don’t think that Matthew kicked anything off (I think that someone had to do it). I also don’t think that this has to be damaging – it depends on how everyone reacts.

On her personal blog Valerie says “When I first read Ts’o’s comments, I couldn’t sleep for two nights. I wanted to throw up every time I thought about it. I was furious and frightened at the same time. Every time I think about this, even now, I literally have nightmares. I can’t bear the thought of working with him even over email, much less attending the same conferences” [7]. I don’t think that any of us who are seriously involved in the FOSS community have a way of avoiding this issue, allowing Valerie and other women who have the same understanding of the situation to go through that without any support is not a neutral action. I think we need to consider whether someone who gives other delegates and speakers nightmares should be welcome to attend a conference. Valerie’s post makes sense to me and I can understand why she doesn’t want to associated with Ted, my understanding of the issue isn’t important or even required, I merely note this because I’m sure that there are lots of readers who will ignore anything that a woman might say.

ITWire has a follow-up article with Ted’s response, Ted fails to address all the issues and seems to think that the people who disagree with him merely don’t appreciate his “nuance” [8]. The thing is that the issue of the incidence of rape was raised in discussion to consider the probability that rape survivors would have been in the audience for the Mark Pesce talk in question. None of Ted’s claims indicate that rape could be rare enough that a crowd of 500+ random people could be expected not to have multiple rape survivors so his comments weren’t even relevant to the discussion. Ted seems unwilling to try to understand the position of all the people who disagree with him.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2011/02/10/lca2011-harassment/
• [2] http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Rape_apology_on_LCA_mailing_list
• [3] http://finallyfeminism101.wordpress.com/2009/10/19/rape-culture-101/
• [4] http://adainitiative.org/2012/10/open-source-software-open-to-all/
• [5] http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/18505.html
• [6] http://www.itwire.com/business-it-news/open-source/57290-garrett-slams-tso-as-rape-apologist
• [7] http://blog.valerieaurora.org/2012/10/29/the-linux-community-cant-remain-silent-while-leaders-make-anti-woman-comments/
• [8] http://www.itwire.com/business-it-news/open-source/57296-tso-denies-ever-saying-rape-is-not-a-problem