Re: What do you think of the foundation?

[Philip Van Hoof <pvanhoof gnome org>]

On Tue, 2009-06-02 at 12:52 +0100, Paul Cooper wrote: 

<snip>

> However you seem to flat out deny that there is a problem so I'm not
> sure what I, or anyone else, can do to convince you that this is a real
> issue.

Paul,

I don't have to be convinced that some of the people are no experts in
communication. Yes, me included.

I am convinced a lot of the same people are very passionate people and
that, although not for everybody, you can sometimes correlate passion
with said occasional bad behavior, too.

Being impulsive by character they want to change the world. This is no
new info, either. We all know this.


I'll formulate my own proposal. Because indeed, otherwise I'm only being
against proposals.

I already proposed the ombudsman ...

If we as a community want to be successful we should allow the more
social people in our community to help the less social ones.

Replying in a friendly tone to a aggressor usually yields far more and
better results than a punishment or public embarrassment. 

That's because humans, like primates, are very good at copying the
successful behaviors of other people.

We're in an endless prisoners dilemma where the vast majority of people
play a Tit for Tat strategy.

If they play defective by being aggressive, yet you circumvent your own
strategy by nonetheless playing cooperative back, showing that this can
be successful too, most people will reply cooperative.

I say most people. Not everybody uses Tit for Tat. Most do.

If you want to improve the culture of your community, you should allow
people who are very good at this to learn aggressive people how things
could be like if they'd just sometimes be a bit more friendly to other
people.

However. Instead there's this new idea in our community where apparently
the idea is that we should punish a lot of our developers out of GNOME.

This is counterproductive.

We're just intelligent monkeys. We copy behaviors that appear to work.

That's how I think you steer a group's culture.



-- 
Philip Van Hoof, freelance software developer
home: me at pvanhoof dot be 
gnome: pvanhoof at gnome dot org 
http://pvanhoof.be/blog
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