Re: push back on negative articles

[Sriram Ramkrishna <sri ramkrishna me>]

On Sun, Aug 19, 2012 at 3:02 PM, Larry Cafiero <larry cafiero gmail com> wrote:

Observations from a former participant who is now an outside observer:

On Sun, Aug 19, 2012 at 2:30 PM, Olav Vitters <olav vitters nl> wrote:

> There are a lot of sites out there whose only intention is to cause
> controversy. This article seems exactly about that. How to deal with
> this: no clue, but IMO it has to be a positive reaction.

Actually, Olav, it's not. Datamation has a pretty wide readership, and
agree with him or not, Bruce Byfield is a fairly well-informed
commentator and not a troll, as you imply. His commentary is not
reporting in a traditional news sense, but more of his opinion, and
agree with him or not (and he and I have had some knock-down, drag-out
discussions when we disagree), he does his homework.

Precisely why responding in comments is appropriate.  I think soem of his arguments are specious and I would prefer to engage here and perhaps it would be mutally beneficial.

I rather make complainers into potential contributors so to speak and in some instances you can accomplish that.
 

> If you start responding point-by-point, you give the control to the
> person whose only intention is to spur controversy.

Again, I disagree. I would be willing to bet that Bruce has better
things to do with his life than stir up controversy.

I think Bruce in general writes negative articles on GNOME, I could be wrong.  If that's his opinion then we should engage with him more, I don't know.

 

>
> I'm not sure what the right approach is, but I think you should be
> careful. It is quite easy to spin any response as e.g. 'GNOME doesn't
> like to hear the truth'.

Arguably, there are many things in this article that GNOME folks
should ask themselves, assuming that Byfield is right in at least some
points in his commentary; to say nothing of working under the
assumption that nothing -- not even GNOME -- is perfect. One
observation right off the bat: I can't use GNOME 3 due to hardware
limitations, and personally I feel that having to use the "fallback
mode" is the digital equivalent of being forced to sit at the back of
the bus (an analogy that's probably only understood by Americans, but
for the rest of you it goes back to racial inequality in the US up to
the 1960s when non-whites had to sit in the back of the bus). I don't
think I'm the only one who feels that way.

That's being over dramatic, don't you think to equate jim crow to gnome?  They aren't remotely the same both emotionally or logically.  In that context it's hard for me to take such arguments seriously.

I'm no fan of Phoronix -- who cares if one desktop is 0.00003ms faster
than another? -- but nevertheless they are thorough. Datamation, too,

I might take claims of performance seriously.
 

is thorough to a large extent. So when you have those two coming out
swinging with problems and/or shortcomings with GNOME 3 or the
community, you might want to approach the problem first by looking in
a mirror before externalizing it with reaction. Arguably the solution
may be beyond the scope of the marketing group, but going at
addressing it in public responsibly -- responsibly and truthfully --
is a fairly important step.

Oh sure, and i think most of us are aware of the shortcomings.  I wasn't privy to the discussions at GUADEC but I was lead to understand that there was a lot of soul searching there.  I think the key take away is that GNOME 3 is still a work in progress and that we haven't remotely finished the design vision so there will be a lot of gaps.

It isn't a marketing team function but a community management function.  I don't think we are doing organized community management as well as we should.  Hopefully, with some work I can help work on that.  I'm interested in community management more than most in the project and I already shoot my mouth off often. :-)
 

Just an observation on a lazy Sunday afternoon.

Thank you for the perspective.  Much appreciated.

sri
 

Larry Cafiero

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