On Sat, 2005-12-17 at 11:30 -0500, Louis Suarez-Potts wrote: > Hello, > > Ian Lynch wrote: > > On Sat, 2005-12-17 at 16:27 +1000, Jean Hollis Weber wrote: > > [snip] > > Let's get away from personal invective and concentrate on > > increasing the take up of OOo and just accept that its not possible to > > centrally control a volunteer community that is more rooted in the > > anarchy of the bazaar than the hierarchy of the cathedral. > > I'm all for getting away from personal invective and also agree that > uptake of OOo is important. But you are being disingenuous, surely, if > you think it is simple as that.
I think in general simple is better. Let's go back to first principles. What matters is the outcome. The process is there to support the outcome so the acid test is how well it does so. > Among other things, the point of this > project is to establish marketing strategy and coordinate marketing > tactics. Yes, but that will be entirely ineffective if significant numbers of people are alienated, especialy folks by everyone else to get things done even if its things that aren't specifically in the grand plan. Plans should be guides, not tablets of stone. People judge things on effectiveness not theory. In a project fundamentally dependent on people as its main resource I would have thought building relationships, being inclusive and helping others through teaching, training and coaching are the essence of leadership and managmement. While the instrumental things like marketing plans are useful, they won't work without the necessary motivated human resources. Read any contemporary managment text and it will confirm this. Its even more important with volunteers. A big problem with technology projects is over-focus on technical solutions at the expense of maintaining the human resource. > This means agreeing on plans and executing them. Ah, the brute force of logic. Snag is you need the resource to do it and the only resource you have is volunteers. If the plan isn't being fulfilled, do you blame the volunteers or the management? Invariably its a management problem to motivate the volunteers. There is an assumption in the logic that if you just publish a plan everyone will be motivated to achieve it. If it was that simple there would be no real need for leadership or management. > It does not > mean do as you like under the impression that as long as you believe you > are advocating OOo that's okay. This is the classic polarisation of the argument that is so common to mailing lists. If its not A its Z when the truth lies somewhere about M. > You are free to do so--outside of this > project. This is precisely the issue. You are short of resource yet you see the solution to the problem is to exclude the resource if it does not comply 100% with your view of how things should be. Then you will probably complain about the damage forks to do to a project if people take you at your word ;-). That seems rash at best. Take the specific example of Ryan's proposal to go to DLS. I have just had a quick go through of the marketing plan and I can see no particular conflict with this. The bit on third party conferences, if anything, would appear to encourage this type of initiative. The difficulty with a 70 page document without an executive summary is of course being sure all angles are absorbed but that is another issue. Ask yourself. Would a venture capitalist back this plan? How sustainable is it without volunteers? > You can represent yourself as a user of OOo: that is always > permitted, of course. But: this project has an obligation to represent > OOo in a coordinated and professional manner. It is thus managed. It causes me some pain and sadness to have to disagree with the conclusion. Its not at all in my nature to be negative but I feel this has to be said. I am a professional management consultant. I write development plans for a living and I assume I'm reasonably good at it because people pay me to do it and I don't have to advertise. My masters is in management and I have spent a good 20 years studying the subject. The fact that this thread has arisen at all demonstrates that there are some significant managment issues with the project that the managers need to resolve and blaming a subset of the volunteers is not the answer. Even if some appear to make your life more difficult than you would want, keeping them on side is the managment challenge. Don't confuse professionalism with rigid structures and procedures or mechanisms of control. The most important aspect of management is optimising resources and that means motivating people, particularly in volunteer organisations. I don't mean any malice to anyone in this let alone the marketing project. I don't actually like the medium of mailing lists for this type of dialogue but we don't really have an alternative. Looking people in the eye and discussing these issues directly is a lot more difficult but a lot more appropriate. Mailing list allow everyone to get completely the wrong end of the stick about other people's intentions and I think this situation is a classic example. Regards, -- Ian Lynch <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ZMS Ltd --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
