Re: What do you think of the foundation?

[Sriram Ramkrishna <sri ramkrishna me>]

On Sat, May 30, 2009 at 9:29 AM, Tristan Van Berkom <tvb gnome org> wrote:

Im taking it that the majority of this discomfort is coming from the
planet website
as opposed to the official mailing lists or the mailing lists of
important projects.

Well nobody is coming out and saying if it is planet or not.  I personally didn't see anything on planet that would have pissed me off or I considered inappropriate.  If someone wants to mail me an example off list I'll look.  Now there are some that I have raised my eyebrows at mostly because they are topics that tend to have people have strongly held political opinions.  Those one should stay away from.  In general I don't see much political opinions which do tend to lead to great distress.

There have been examples of personal attacks as well but those have been few and far between.

On the one hand planet is a blog site, which was not meant to be a
technical blog -
most of the content relates either to hacking, vacationing,
philisophical rantings,
jokes, personal journals and even cooking and poetry. - the point is
when you write
your blog, you are not writing an article and paying very strict
attention, your just
writing a blog entry.

I don't blog very often but I tend to write when an idea of who my audience is.  When you decide you want your blog published on planet there is a certain amount of self censure you will need to do since you're now representing GNOME in some manner.  We must and have to protect the brand. I suggest that when people are added that we have a link to the code of conduct and make them aware.  If they can't abide by that then we should turn off their feed.  I think that's perfectly fine.
 

On the other hand, when speaking comfortably among friends, its always very
easy to piss somebody off unintentionally, just because you didnt take extra
care to take another person's opinions into account before speaking.

Crap, I have to self censure even on facebook due to the wide variety of people I piss off with my opinions.  I care about my brand too :)  Even though it's probably spoiled already!

 

When you are dealing with a richly multiethnic community, alot more opinions
become unknowns in the equation so it all of a sudden become very easy
for people to get offended.

Right.  But one can still disagree respectively.  People who react to a potential blog post also have a duty to be respectful if the content was respectful.
 

Is there something we can do to better represent ourselves and better
educate the public on how to communicate with us ?

No idea.  Planet is the most passive way to know about our community.
 

For example, it took me quite some time to write this email thankyou,
thats because I feel accountable wearing a gnome hat, I already dont
blog much... and I like to feel that there I can express what I feel
and share with the community, not to feel all that accountable you know...

Same here.  I try write blog posts but then realize maybe I shouldn't write that.  Especially since I'm quite flippant and so I have a more professional personality on mailing list and planet since not only am I representing GNOME, I'm on some level representing my employer, and my professional self online.  On, IRC however I'm a completely different person.   Unless someone here is logging... :)

sri