Re: Part of me is laughing, part of me is crying

[Evan Lawrence <evan unix worldpath net>]

On Thu, 6 Aug 1998, Bowie Poag wrote:

> Bowie has EXPERIENCE dealing with these kinds of projects. Tom does not.
> Bowie's experience tells him that a completely open approach to developing
> a document of this kind will fail miserably. Tom doesn't listen. Bowie
> waits for Tom to figure it out for himself.

Tom has a syle guide with some content. Bowie does not.

> And meanwhile, while we all wait for Tom, we all suffer through 150 emails
> a day of pure chaos and confusion.

Not to point any fingers, but it has already been noted who a 100 of
these emails have been from.

> > First of all, appoint some sort of moderator.  Not a maintainer, a doer of all
> > things, a god, a demigod, a worshipped figure.  No, someone with a decent head
> > on their shoulders, and good communication skills. 
> 
> This is actually my job, since I was appointed by Frederico to head up
> this project. Tom apparently doesn't want to recognize my authority here.
> And again, as a result, we all have 150 emails of pure confusion per day
> to deal with, as a result.

I have to say, you've already shown yourself not to be a very good
moderator - a glance at your previous messages to this list, especially
those in the thread "Err.. to Desktop or not to desktop" show this to be
the simple fact of the matter. A moderator needs to take certain
suggestions less personally, and not treat criticism of an idea or way of
doing things a personal attack.

> What you're suggestion is what I've said all along.. You CANT develop a
> document of this nature, in a totally, completely open environment. The
> result is anarchy. The process must be OPEN, BUT CONTROLLED.. And nobody's
> listening.  We're too busy arguing pathetic crap like whether or not we
> should be using a weenie picture of a footprint, use some bizzare word
> "Prog", or whatever. You call this progress?

Yes. We're sorting out the details of whether we should use a program
menu, a text or icon, etc - last I checked you were still sorting out what
should go in the Table of Contents.