Re: Module Proposal: Zeitgeist

[meg ford <meg387 gmail com>]

Hi Emily,

On Tue, Apr 24, 2012 at 4:19 PM, Colin Walters <walters verbum org> wrote:

Hi Emily,

On Sun, 2012-04-22 at 10:27 -0400, Emily Gonyer wrote:
> Then the design team ought to be more open about what exactly 'their'
> vision for gnome is, as well as open to other ideas/concepts.
> Insisting on doing things their way, while being extremely vague as to
> what exactly their way *is* is not helpful to the rest of the
> community who is trying to get stuff done. IMHO the entire community
> is rather insulated from itself and rather hard to break into w/o
> serious help from someone already on the 'inside' as it were. If you
> haven't been around for years, no-one seems to particularly care what
> you have to say. Even finding these sorts of discussions isn't exactly
> easy, let alone making your voice heard.

Your criticism here has merit, but I would assert that there is
some degree of this kind of insularity in many communities and
organizations.  A lot of communities rely implicitly on what in politics
is called "political capital" - where to cause a change, particularly
one that implies work by other people, you need to have built
up some goodwill and/or reputation.

I agree, this is a really intimidating part of joining the community. When I was doing my OPW internship, I was also really intimidated by the Design Team in particular -- which was bad because I was working on a project  with Design Team members. Part of the reason I felt that way was that there was a discussion a lot like this one going on on the mailing list. I'm not saying that I think the situation is perfect -- sometimes I have a hard time dealing with working in the open and the criticism that goes along with it.  I do think (and I've contributed to design but no one has ever called me a design team member) that there are issues in the community that need to be resolved, so I think the discussion is productive, as long as we aren't sending a negative message to newcomers or letting the community splinter over issues like this.

Meg Ford

In my work on the engineering side, I react completely differently
to people who I know have contributed something already versus ones
I don't know, because I have some assurance that by helping them
solve their problem, they are likely to help me later in some way.

But again, I'm not saying that there's no problem - there clearly are
things we as a community could do significantly better.


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