Hi Emily,

On Tue, Apr 24, 2012 at 4:19 PM, Colin Walters <[email protected]> wrote:

> Hi Emily,
>
> On Sun, 2012-04-22 at 10:27 -0400, Emily Gonyer wrote:
> > Then the design team ought to be more open about what exactly 'their'
> > vision for gnome is, as well as open to other ideas/concepts.
> > Insisting on doing things their way, while being extremely vague as to
> > what exactly their way *is* is not helpful to the rest of the
> > community who is trying to get stuff done. IMHO the entire community
> > is rather insulated from itself and rather hard to break into w/o
> > serious help from someone already on the 'inside' as it were. If you
> > haven't been around for years, no-one seems to particularly care what
> > you have to say. Even finding these sorts of discussions isn't exactly
> > easy, let alone making your voice heard.
>
> Your criticism here has merit, but I would assert that there is
> some degree of this kind of insularity in many communities and
> organizations.  A lot of communities rely implicitly on what in politics
> is called "political capital" - where to cause a change, particularly
> one that implies work by other people, you need to have built
> up some goodwill and/or reputation.
>

I agree, this is a really intimidating part of joining the community. When
I was doing my OPW internship, I was also really intimidated by the Design
Team in particular -- which was bad because I was working on a project
with Design Team members. Part of the reason I felt that way was that there
was a discussion a lot like this one going on on the mailing list. I'm not
saying that I think the situation is perfect -- sometimes I have a hard
time dealing with working in the open and the criticism that goes along
with it.  I do think (and I've contributed to design but no one has ever
called me a design team member) that there are issues in the community that
need to be resolved, so I think the discussion is productive, as long as we
aren't sending a negative message to newcomers or letting the community
splinter over issues like this.

Meg Ford

>
> In my work on the engineering side, I react completely differently
> to people who I know have contributed something already versus ones
> I don't know, because I have some assurance that by helping them
> solve their problem, they are likely to help me later in some way.
>
> But again, I'm not saying that there's no problem - there clearly are
> things we as a community could do significantly better.
>
>
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