> Open-source projects depend on their community and contributors, and community management is inherently political. No matter what "neutral" thing you do, some contributors will approve of that, and some will see it as a red flag.
There's this saying some people have, "there's three things you don't talk about at work: sex, politics and religion". (I think an older version had "money" instead of "sex"–from the days when sex wasn't talked about so much that we didn't even talk about the fact that we didn't talk about it.)
And it isn't necessarily bad advice. Do we really want heated workplace arguments about Israel-and-Palestine, Biden-vs-Trump, etc? We have to work with people who have completely different views from us on big picture political issues. Sometimes it is better we just agree to disagree and focus on what we have in common – airing those disagreements in detail can just produce negative feelings and disruption.
But of course, every office, every open source project has politics. But that's the thing, people traditionally draw a distinction between "micropolitics" (the politics of our workplace) and "macropolitics" (national politics, geopolitics). You cannot escape micropolitics, it is everywhere, it is inevitable. But macropolitics, yes, we should avoid it at work whenever possible.
Of course, people will then bring up "the personal is the political", and it is true. Transgender issues, for example: a big political controversy, but obviously for transgender people a very personal one.
However, even there, I think there is a useful distinction. A transgender employee isn't breaking the "no macropolitics at work" rule by being transgender, or talking about their personal experiences, or so on. But, consider Lynn Conway's public campaigns against the psychologist J. Michael Bailey and the sexologist Ray Blanchard – even though that was obviously very personal for her, it wouldn't have been appropriate for her to carry it on at work. Well, she actually did use her UMich web page for those campaigns, but the norms about this are different in academia than in your average workplace.
And politics is personal for all kinds of people: I remember back in 2010 when the Israeli military intercepted the "Gaza Freedom Flotilla", the team I was in at the time had some very heated discussion over it. Afterwards, a Jewish team member talked to me privately, and I could tell the whole discussion had made him feel rather uncomfortable, because it felt personal to him. And one of the other participants in the conversation was Palestinian, so it was obviously personal to him too. But still, in hindsight I wish the whole discussion had never happened, and I regret my own (rather peripheral) role in it. We broke the "no politics at work" rule, and it did pointless harm to our cohesion as a team.
There's this saying some people have, "there's three things you don't talk about at work: sex, politics and religion". (I think an older version had "money" instead of "sex"–from the days when sex wasn't talked about so much that we didn't even talk about the fact that we didn't talk about it.)
And it isn't necessarily bad advice. Do we really want heated workplace arguments about Israel-and-Palestine, Biden-vs-Trump, etc? We have to work with people who have completely different views from us on big picture political issues. Sometimes it is better we just agree to disagree and focus on what we have in common – airing those disagreements in detail can just produce negative feelings and disruption.
But of course, every office, every open source project has politics. But that's the thing, people traditionally draw a distinction between "micropolitics" (the politics of our workplace) and "macropolitics" (national politics, geopolitics). You cannot escape micropolitics, it is everywhere, it is inevitable. But macropolitics, yes, we should avoid it at work whenever possible.
Of course, people will then bring up "the personal is the political", and it is true. Transgender issues, for example: a big political controversy, but obviously for transgender people a very personal one.
However, even there, I think there is a useful distinction. A transgender employee isn't breaking the "no macropolitics at work" rule by being transgender, or talking about their personal experiences, or so on. But, consider Lynn Conway's public campaigns against the psychologist J. Michael Bailey and the sexologist Ray Blanchard – even though that was obviously very personal for her, it wouldn't have been appropriate for her to carry it on at work. Well, she actually did use her UMich web page for those campaigns, but the norms about this are different in academia than in your average workplace.
And politics is personal for all kinds of people: I remember back in 2010 when the Israeli military intercepted the "Gaza Freedom Flotilla", the team I was in at the time had some very heated discussion over it. Afterwards, a Jewish team member talked to me privately, and I could tell the whole discussion had made him feel rather uncomfortable, because it felt personal to him. And one of the other participants in the conversation was Palestinian, so it was obviously personal to him too. But still, in hindsight I wish the whole discussion had never happened, and I regret my own (rather peripheral) role in it. We broke the "no politics at work" rule, and it did pointless harm to our cohesion as a team.