Spoiler: Diversity & Debian means different things to different people
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock.
17:00 Thu, 19 Mar 2026
Sruthi Chandran is the only candidate in the current round of Debian voting. In her previous campaigns, she told us she nominated to promote diversity.
Diversity is a very broad term. It means different things to each person. Any time somebody claims they want to spend money on diversity, it is vital to ask them exactly how the money will be allocated and how each beneficiary or event will be selected and managed.
Without knowing those details, people can simply do whatever they want with the Debian bank account and if they are challenged when the account is empty, they can simply say they spent it on diversity.
To give an example, the well known Emily's List program aims to fund women in politics. It supports women with a wide range of policies and platforms. However, there is one condition: they only support pro-choice women. Pro-life women are excluded. When a free software organisation allocates money to diversity, should it aim to introduce conditions like that or should it avoid doing so?
Compare the official list of Debian women (wiki) (and the Statistics page list of women) to the list of women who are part of the Debian pregnancy cluster, which hasn't covered every woman yet anyway. More than half the women appear to be wives or girlfriends of male developers. When people have allocated money to diversity in the past, have they been deliberately seeking women who will continue that trend?
In my view, the pursuit of diversity in a real free software organisation means the search for a female version of Dr Richard Stallman.
What can go wrong?
Remember DebConf19 conference dinner in Brazil, where a group of four Albanian women were seated at the leader's table.
Remember when one or more of the men from the ENS Cachan CR@NS love nest in Paris wanted to offer $6,000 Outreachy money to a much younger man who appeared to be contemplating a gender transition. Is it really ethical to offer financial inducements in such circumstances?
Will Sruthi Chandran be used as a weapon to humiliate more people, as we saw in the elimination of former leader Branden Robinson or the exploitation of Phil Wyett?
The best way to encourage people to nominate for the election will be for the existing leader, Andreas Tille, to withdraw all the privacy attacks, settle the lawsuits proactively and ensure the next leader can walk in and find the desk is clean ready to work on productive things.
Don't hold your breath waiting for transparency about these attacks on my family. There is still time to watch my video and contribute to the crowdfunding campaign. █