Plato’s Cave, Diversity, and Drupal

Plato’s Cave

The Prisoner

(tl::dr - If you want to skip the read, take a listen to a rather empowered YouTube video on the topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=69F7GhASOdM)

For a little background, provided shamelessly by Wikipedia and available within most Western history books, the Allegory of the Cave was the brain-child of the (now) World renowned Grecian philosopher Plato in his work the Republic as a conversation between Plato’s brother Glaucon and his mentor Socrates.

Socrates (as Narrator) asks Glaucon to imagine a Cave. Within this Cave are a group of people imprisoned from birth. These Prisoners are unable to move, even to see each other. Their entire world is one of watching the Shadows dance on the wall in front of them and the sounds of people talking. Those sounds, to the Prisoners, must be from the Dancing Shadows).

The Dancing Shadows, unknown to the Prisoners, are the objects and puppets being carried by the people talking. The objects themselves speak none-at-all.

The Eternal Prison has a single Prisoner freed.

After gaining freedom the Prisoner turns and sees the Fire, but is initially completely blinded by something New: Light. Despite the Prisoner’s pain and confusion (at a completely rewritten worldview), the Prisoner is then forcibly dragged upwards into REALITY by the Others. This causes even more confusion for the former Prisoner as they only barely accepted the reality of the FIRE, much less the Existence of SUNLIGHT.

Returning to the Cave

Here is where Diversity and the Cave truly meet.

Because, upon returning to the Cave after adjusting to the brightness of Sunlight, the Prisoner would be completely Blind within the Deep Darkness. Those Prisoners, locked in Eternal Prisons, would decide leaving the Cave would be harmful and:

“… would he not provoke laughter, and would it not be said of him that he had returned from his journey aloft with his eyes ruined and that it was not worth while even to attempt the ascent? And if it were possible to lay hands on and to kill the man who tried to release them and lead them up, would they not kill him?” ~Republic (517a)

“They certainly would,” ~Republic (517a)

Observe it is not fear which drives the Prisoners to lash out against those Others who forcibly dragged one of their Brethren into the Light. They lash out due to a misplaced sense of self-preservation.

Yet, ponder this:

IS their sense of self-preservation misplaced? For only after becoming accustomed to the pain caused by the Sun enough to observe the Moon, the Stars, and, finally, the Sun itself “is he (the first Prisoner) able to reason about it”. It took a great deal of pain, anxiety, confusion, and enforced self-improvement before the First Prisoner was even able to appreciate the changes within this uncomfortable new Reality.

Enlightenment, to use a quasi-religious reference, has always been a painful transition, not just an uncomfortable one.

Diversity and Drupal

Dr. Rebecca LeMoine of the Florida Atlantic University is actively working on her first book, titled Plato’s Caves: The Liberating Sting of Cultural Diversity, where she explores the theory “that for Plato, every polis or political community functions like the cave in his famous cave allegory, with each polity constructing its own way of interpreting the “shadows on the wall” “(LeMoine, 2017).

So, does Drupal? Have we, as the Drupal Community I know and love, defined our “Dancing Shadows”? Have we, as the greater Tech Community defined our “Dancing Shadows”?

Let us pose this query: Have you heard of Plato before? Were you taught about Plato in school? Because assuming all Readers knew who Plato was and what he did would have been exclusive, even unintentionally.

I believe the better question on whether Drupal can sometimes hold an Island mentality. might be “how do we find the Light”?

The answer, and the Enlightened Reader can tell my field of interest here, is in Version Control and Continual Improvement.

Let me give some examples of just the growth in the last few years:

  • May he lead well for a long time, in 2014 our Founder Dries wrote a blog post entitled (Fostering inclusivity and diversity)[http://buytaert.net/fostering-inclusivity-and-diversity “Fostering inclusivity and diversity”].
  • Last August (2016), following her powerful Keynote at Drupal Camp Costa Rica 2016, Nikki Stevens outlined a number of Challenges faced with the initial ‘Dive In’ on just creating a valid, sustainable, reliable Survey on Diversity of the Web.
  • Jeffrey A. “jam” McGuire of Acquia interviewed Nikki (following her Keynote) on the growth of Diversity in Tech, the Diversity of the Web survey being compiled by Nikki and Nick Lewis and how the two instigators actually created a GitHub repo and Crowd-Sourced the Survey to make it actually inclusive and diverse.
  • DrupalCamp Munich, in November of 2016, had a hot topic on Diversity from many different areas, even though DD&I truly wasn’t the focal point of the Camp. However:
    • after the Community noticed there was only a single woman speaking (out of 47), DD&I very quickly became a hot topic. This focus went into high-drive when,
    • a Twitter post about magazines of a, let’s say, provocative nature aimed at a mostly male audience was released showing said magazines as part of the DrupalCamp Swag Bags (against even the Camp’s posted Code of Conduct, which included the phrase “We are respectful”).
  • This turned out to be a good thing however!
    • The magazines were pulled, the Organization Team eventually released a public apology,
    • jam (noted above) wrote a very inspiring article about making a difference and realizing that the Drupal Community needs to continue moving forward on bettering ourselves as a Community (see quote below).
    • Josef Dabernig of Amazee Labs authored an equally inspired piece detailing some of the other great things which happened due to the initial oversights, such as a huge “Diversity Matters” BoF (Birds of a Feather) talk with live notes taken on that include transcription and useful references.

I apologize if I have missed any major milestones within the last two years. What is important to recognize however is the divergence from the ‘Cave’ the Drupal Community may have unintentionally been existing on previously.

Dancing Shadows in Drupal

“jam” put it best as an edit on his blog:

”“Edit 2016.Dec.04: And thank you if you pointed out problems. To put it in developer terms, without bug reports, we might not know what’s broken. With them, we can improve. Iteration #ftw” (McGuire, 2016).

DrupalCon Baltimore publicly declared a move geared towards “Setting Diversity as a DrupalCon Goal”. Yet, even their declaration could possibly use some expansion as they focus their DD&I efforts on the “Big Eight” Social Identifiers:

  1. Ability
  2. Age
  3. Ethnicity
  4. Gender
  5. Race
  6. Religion
  7. Sexual Orientation
  8. Socio-Economic Status/Class

The Big 8 are a great start. The problem, within the Drupal Community as it is today, is a lack of Standardization of DD&I, ACA, etc. plans. The Community as a whole has a Code of Conduct. DrupalCon:NewOrleans and DrupalCon:Baltimore have an expanded version of the Code of Conduct posted on their sites. Yet, querying a few of the previous and upcoming DrupalCamps does not return the same content.

Alternatively, what about Organizers whom are volunteering their time for local DrupalCamps, Sprints, Events, etc. with zero experience with ADA? Zero experience with Food Allergies? Zero experience with phobias?

Sometimes, finding the Light means having the tools to do so.

Seeing the Light

(re: Revisioning our way out of the Cave and Off the Island)

Introducing the (Work In Progress) Event Organizer Packet and the DD&I Group

The Drupal Diversity Team recognized one of the heaviest missing tools in creating an Event Organizer Packet is having an Event Organizer Packet in the first place.

So, one was created using GitHub, with full Version Control and iterative style design and improvements: https://drupal-diversity.gitbooks.io/drupal-organizer-resources/

Though currently (and always) a Work In Progress, the Goal behind the Org-Packet is to aggregate all of the best, most efficient, and most thorough methods of running a DrupalCamp. Then, the Org-Packet can be updated with Checklists of “Do This” or “Don’t Do This” from Community Experts who have been there and done that.

References

  • (Buytaert, Dries, 2014 07). Fostering inclusivity and diversity. buytaert.net. http://buytaert.net/fostering-inclusivity-and-diversity
  • (Dabernig, Josef, 2016 12). DIVERSITY MATTERS. Amazee Labs. https://www.amazeelabs.com/en/blog/diversity-matters
  • (LeMoine, Rebecca, 2017 02). Research / Dissertation: Philosophy and the Foreigner in Plato’s Dialogues. RebeccaLeMoine.com. http://www.rebeccalemoine.com/Rebecca_LeMoine/research.html
  • (McGuire, Jeffrey, 2016 12). 241: Nothing About Us Without Us - Diversity of the Web with Nikki Stevens. Acquia. https://dev.acquia.com/podcast/241-nothing-about-us-without-us-diversity-web-nikki-stevens https://medium.com/@horncologne/empathy-diversity-and-open-source-e0f60126002c#.rt8zjwyt0
  • (McGuire, Jeffrey, 2016 12). Empathy, diversity, and open source. Medium.com/@horncologne. https://medium.com/@horncologne/empathy-diversity-and-open-source-e0f60126002c#.rt8zjwyt0
  • (Wade, Lisa. PhD, 2014 January 09). Many Americans Overestimate, Fear Racial Diversity. The Society Pages. https://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2014/01/09/many-americans-overestimate-and-fear-racial-diversity/

Look me up

“No man is an island.” ~ John Donne (1624)

If there’s a mistake, let me know. If I can make it better, let me know.

Thoughts, recommendations, good recipes for cooking pumpkin:

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