Thanks for this post, Shane. You share a number of my concerns. I am absolutely not blind to opposition to some of the things I've suggested, but I would argue that the thread on the topic has become so negative and heated that informed discussion isn't useful.
Again I encourage others to listen to and read my presentation to hear my concrete, achievable suggestions, and others' reactions to them at the meeting. ----- Original Message ----- Shane wrote: > A situation that's happened to me personally with saddening > regularity: > I come up with a new idea to improve a process or document, and ask > for > feedback. Some of the feedback asks "why are we bothering with this" > or > "I think that's wrong because X", or merely asks clarifying questions > / > requests for more additional data, or or or... and often ends up > being > an endless game of "fetch me a rock". > > After attempting to answer a half-dozen of these questions - many > tangential or merely expressing opposition *without providing useful > alternatives*, I simply run out of volunteer energy and give up on > the > idea completely, and I find some other place to spend my time. The > opposition of just a couple of people spending the time to keep > asking > for clarifications can often turn into a de facto veto for all sorts > of > new ideas. Yes, this is exactly the war of attrition that I'm trying to avoid in my last post. It shouldn't be up to me to endlessly rebut all of the attacks on this; they've been written hundreds and hundreds of times to date, even limiting yourself to open source development. It's not my job to rehash this yet again for another newcomer to the discussion. The concern trolling assumes bad intentions on my part. I think the proposals I've made speak for themselves as not being ill-intentioned, and don't step too far. They are in the Apache tradition of small, incremental, reversible steps. > > Apache communities work better when people who think a new idea is > [dumb > | annoying | not useful | whatever ] simply raise the general concern > once, but otherwise get out of the way. We're all volunteers; we all > have opinions; we all have things we want to work on in our different > communities. We can respectfully say we don't like some new idea, > but > it's not up to any of us to stop other volunteers from doing that new > idea that they're passionate about. > > Even better: when you don't like a new idea, come up with a better > idea, > and volunteer your own time in a new thread to productively work on > it. Yes, I'd like to shift the discussion in this direction. > Bonus link, that I hadn't seen before but I really like the > *explanations* behind this organization's social rules: > > https://www.recurse.com/social-rules Pretty sure I linked to this and mentioned it in my presentation, too. :) -Joan "let's talk action" Touzet --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@community.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@community.apache.org
