Re: Questions

[Jan Morén <jan moren lucs lu se>]

sön 2003-12-28 klockan 19.54 skrev Ali Akcaagac:
> Regardless to that I do believe that what Nat Friedman wrote in his
> Membership clause (see link in another reply) does make a lot of sense
> even in other parts within GNOME. I for my own did far more
> contributions to GNOME than CVSGnome (Balsa, Galeon, my own stuff etc.).
> I used to be quite an active person and I bet that until now I would
> have contributed even more if I didn't had the feeling all the time to
> be some sort of attachment of a community. Permanently being told what
> to do, what to not do, being controlled or even get the feeling that
> GNOME isn't as free anymore as it initially was etc. All the PR spread
> by the same people over and over again e.g. 'millions of happy GNOME
> users worldwide' and yet it's impossible to find a handful of people for
> rotation of the Board Members or the Release Team sounds quite strange
> to me.

I've been following this discussion for a while, and I have a comment on
that last point above.

Thing is, for any kind of "volontary" activity, people have this
problem. Whether it is sports clubs, the boy scouts, fraternity or
student organizations, building co-ops, political organizations or what
have you, getting people to become active - rather than passive -
participants is very difficult. Getting people to become active (and
make for redundancy) when they see the minimum number of positions
already filled by others is well nigh impossible.

I have been more or less active in a number of organizations, from the
very small to the moderately large, and there is very little correlation
between membership size and enthusiasm on one hand, and willing supply
of candidates for positions on the other. Rather you will have more or
less reluctant people up until you fill the available posts and no more.
I think there may be an interesting sociological and psychological
lesson in there somewhere.

One explanation may simply be that sitting in a position of
responsibility and essentially managing a part of the project is not the
reason we become involved in the first place. People become members of a
soccer club to play soccer, not to sit and worry about budgets. People
join Greenpeace because they want to work for the environment, not
because they want to take down the minutes of some long meeting. We all
joined GNOME because we like to code, translate, document or what have
you together with likeminded people. Tearing your hair out over release
schedules or try to mediate conflicts between developers is the kind of
stuff many of us have to worry about at work and want to get away from
for our hobby.

For my part, I am immensely grateful for these people in the foundation
board, release team and so on that have courageously taken on those
responsibilities so I don't have to. :)


-- 
 
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
 
Tel.    +46-046 222 8588             Dr. Janne Morén (mr)
Home:   +46-046 211 4973             Dept. of Cognitive Science
Fax:    +46-046 222 9758             Kungshuset, Lund
                                     S-222 22 Lund, Sweden