Inclusive Naming Maintainers Circle Notes

link to celestes deck

Inclusive Naming Initative

• http://inclusivenaming.org/
• https://github.com/inclusivenaming
• https://groups.google.com/g/inclusivenaming
• started in k8s
• grew into a cross org consensus on how, why, who, etc
• whitelist/blacklist is just one example
• do research into what the replacement should be
• guidance on implementation process

GitHubs Guidance:
github.com/github/renaming

• providing mechanism to provide a path of least destruction
• org admins have the capability to change branch name and retarget PRs

Breakout Group #1

Is 'blackbox' offensive? How do we decide?

criteria discussed:

1. origin of the term
2. current connotations
3. consider how marginalized groups feel about it (without assuming the individuals take on extra responsibility/work or are tokenized)
4. collaborate with both internal and cross-organization initiatives: don't reinvent the wheel
5. Is it actually descriptive of what it's being used for?

Services, Packages, Pipelines affected

• Search for where in your project it’s used and where it’s used. Is it in discussion vs. written into the code?
• Documentation both internal and external; testing frameworks tend to be more internal
• What if it’s not used in your code but packages you import use it?
• In research: how offensive is it? Would we try to drop it vs. would we pull dependencies?
• Awareness of different implications, history, racism, etc. in different regions.
• What's the "severity" of the word?

Breakout Group #2

Appropriate?

• We should do research first!
• Grandfathered? I didn't know that was bad initially
• Black-box –> opaque (plane connotation)? Is this already well-understood?
• Don't know what you don't know
• Is the term well-understood? Ambiguous? Could we be more descriptive?

Research

• History, context-based, cultural?
• Etymology? What might this term contrast against?
• What might we replace this with?
• Governance. Can we lean on something that's laid out in project governance to help make the decision/learn more? Argue from this position.
• Google it!
• Do my own research to decrease the burden

Replacement

Back to research section!

Impact

• Kubernetes: no strong reason to keep it. Seems low impact
  • Prometheus: blackbox-exporter. This is a dependency. How do we handle it? Request changes to that project? Mark the dependency as an exception.
• CI, docs, branches, website redirects
• falco: Restarted from zero. Ripped out the docs. A lot of code examples vs narrative
• linkerd: just do it. We were small enough to just go and make the changes
• Messaging and value

Gameplan

Work things based on impact.
Consult experts in your project!

Chat bites

captured from chat

• Flux https://github.com/fluxcd/flux2/issues/152
• Helm (waiting for GitHub, because of how big the footprint of effect would be) https://github.com/helm/helm/issues/8412
• Google Inclusive Language Guidance https://developers.google.com/style/inclusive-documentation
• inclusive naming changes should be dealt with the same way any other api changes are, no?