patcon
commented
4 years ago First off, I totally get it that inline attribution right in a section of docs might seem a little much :) I'd love to kick around some other options, but I'll also share why it feels important. (And why the convo feels bigger than one little line in a doc.)
Rationale
In the spaces where I've done in-person and online community organizing (ie. in free culture environments), we've come to believe it's important to be generous with gratitude. And since FOSS culture relies highly on docs, a culture of gratitude often takes the form of attributions within these docs -- lots of names and pointers back to the shoulders we're standing on. After all, in free culture, everything here is all-too-easily available to be taken without acknowledging origins and inspirations. And offering attribution encourages readers to return the attribution in kind; it pays dividends. It sets baseline expectations to think on where we learned something before sharing; what we're synthesizing from. (I've felt the effects of this when I've seen Civic Tech Toronto get props 2 hops down the line, almost like there are "sticky bits" that travel with the information we passed down the chain.)
The above is very inspired by conversations around indigenous wisdom (h/t chapter of Braiding Sweetgrass) and feminist citation (h/t dcwalk for the share) -- using citations to pass power backward and build relationships between citer and those cited, rather than the traditional purpose of citations to elevate the citer higher than they might stand on their own.
You can’t listen to the Thanksgiving Address without feeling wealthy. And, while expressing gratitude seems innocent enough, it is a revolutionary idea. [...] The words are simple, but in the art of their joining, they become a statement of sovereignty, a political structure, [...] [The Thanksgiving Address] is a powerful political document, a social contract, a way of being—all in one piece. But first and foremost, it is the credo for a culture of gratitude. Cultures of gratitude must also be cultures of reciprocity. Each person, human or no, is bound to every other in a reciprocal relationship. Just as all beings have a duty to me, I have a duty to them. — Allegiance to Gratitude, Braiding Sweetgrass
In an academic context, the purpose of citation is to acknowledge sources and ideas often attributed to authority figures and seminal texts. In the context of our letters, citation expands this practice in multiple directions outside of the academy. In our letters, we acknowledge the source of our prose and situate its significance. But in my letters, I also acknowledge the reader – my friend – which in turn opens up the potential to situate the reader’s own experiences as also being significant. But this is not just about seeing one’s personal experiences “represented.” In her letter, my friend also expressed the desire to share Rankine’s work with friends and colleagues, pointing to the potential for building up a collective dialogue around how racism feels through the body for those who experience it, experience it differently or don’t experience it at all. — https://cmagazine.com/issues/126/feminist-approaches-to-citation
This way of working is what we've encouraged in Civic Tech Toronto, and in Environmental Data & Governance Initiative:
- A presentation some civic tech organizers gave, where the above underpins: https://discourse.codeforamerica.org/t/we-the-north-civic-tech-organizing-in-toronto-origins-and-extrapolations-from-an-international-city-brigade-congress-2019/631
- https://github.com/edgi-govdata-archiving/overview/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md#submitting-code-and-documentation-changes
- https://github.com/edgi-govdata-archiving/overview/blob/master/CONDUCT.md#code-of-conduct
Proposal
What about using numbered annotations? 1
Thanks for considering!
Footnotes
1. With little contextual notes and backlinks :)
colinmegill
Re-tickted from https://github.com/pol-is/polisServer/pull/261#discussion_r426380856