On self-moderation and making GNOME a fun project again!

[Vincent Untz <vuntz gnome org>]

Hey,

This is a lengthy (and a bit naive, I guess ;-))) mail, so I'll provide
a short summary here for people who don't want to read everything:

  Please try to self-moderate when participating to a heated discussion,
  and don't forget that our shared goal is to make GNOME rock, so let's
  all focus on our contributions instead of long mailing list threads!
  We're contributing to GNOME because we love it and it's fun. We should
  keep it this way :-)

The longer version is below.

=====

Are you happy with the way foundation-list has been in the last few
days?

I know I'm not, and clearly many people share this opinion. A huge
amount of contributors didn't even participate in the recent threads;
they preferred to keep working on improving GNOME their own way instead,
because they felt the discussion was going nowhere. Sure, some parts of
the recent threads were useful, but those parts just got lost in the
noise.

Some people tried to fix this by talking privately to some of the
participants in the discussion, but apparently this doesn't help.

This mailing list is not welcoming anymore, and this reflects badly on
the project as a whole. We're harming GNOME. Actively. I do hope that's
not what people want to achieve.

We can all help there by just behaving correctly on this mailing list. I
feel stupid doing so, but I've put at the end of this mail a list of
hints on how to make foundation-list a great place again. Most of us
already know all this for sure :-) But a reminder cannot hurt, I guess.

I want to invite everybody to  stop contributing to the old threads.
Let's forget about them. Go back and focus on your great contributions!
We have a lot of concrete things to accomplish today, and that's what we
we should be doing!

If you were having a useful discussion in some lost-in-the-noise parts
of the threads, I encourage you to move it to another mailing list for
now, or to take it private with a few people in the next few days. You
can always share a summary of the conclusions later on.

As for the discussion about strategic goals for GNOME: this is indeed an
important topic. We apparently need to find a better way to discuss such
a complex topic than just an open discussion, though. A solution could
be to have someone collect feedback from the community, and then have a
group of people analyze this feedback to propose a document that could
then be easier to discuss. Feel free to contact the board if you're
interested in helping this way.

Thanks for reading all this; you can reply to this mail if you think
it's worth it, but privately if possible :-)

Now let's have fun together, and let's make GNOME rock!

Love,

Vincent

=====

Hints of what you can do to keep a mailing list discussion sane:

 + Do not assume that people will ignore you if they don't care about
   what you're saying. On the contrary, they get annoyed after a while,
   and this can lead to personal attacks.

 + On the other hand, try to ignore people that you think are really
   missing the point. There's no point in going after them.

 + Do not argue on the same topic again and again: people remember your
   opinion, and they don't need to hear it all the time.

 + When replying, you might actually move the discussion to a new topic.
   Don't hesitate to change the subject of your mail in this case, or to
   start a new thread, or even to move the discussion to another mailing
   list which is more appropriate (as Felix suggested).

 + When replying (and especially when you see there's heat in the
   discussion), think twice about whether your reply is worth sending or
   not.

 + Taking the discussion off-list is always an option, especially when
   an argument is between two or three people only.

 + Wait 10 minutes before replying. Often, it helps realize there was no
   reason to reply.

-- 
Les gens heureux ne sont pas pressés.