Hi Charles,
As always it's entertaining talking with you.
On Fri, 2008-03-07 at 16:02 +0100, Charles-H. Schulz wrote:
> Yes, it is one; I thought it was a community event. While technical
> discussions are perennial to our project, I don't see the need for
> segregating the community between hackers and non hackers;
As I understand it this is a normal practice for organic communities:
eg. the Linux Kernel Summit[1] - has purely technical talks, or say the
Gnome Developers Summit[2], or perhaps aKademy (AFAIR originally billed
as a "developers conference"). There are of course a myriad of
hack-fests, and other highly technical conferences on many topics
everywhere.
Are you suggesting that these are fundamentally evil ? that developers
meeting to talk, enjoy each others' company, work together and discuss
technical detail is bad ? it's not as if we are excluding anyone - just
warning ahead of time this will be technical, and our core constituency
is hackers. Clearly broader conferences have their place too.
> every part of our community is legitimate
Did I suggest it was not ?
> > Honestly, I'm happy to talk politics[1] vigorously: will you
> > share an hour slot with me for a debate on the future of OpenOffice in
> > Beijing ?
>
> I will be more than happy to do so
Great; I suggest the Parlimentary debating style[3] and a proposal of
the form:
"Contribution to OpenOffice.org by entities with
diverse motivations is a strength not a weakness"
[ or you can cast it negatively if you wish ].
I'm sure Sun, or someone can provide an impartial speaker to compare
it: I'm not sure how well it would go over to a predominantly non native
speaking audience, though with slides we might get somewhere: sounds
fun.
> although debating with somebody from Microsoft could have probably
> sped up things.
Nice rhetoric, shame about the mismatch with reality; and what do you
want to speed up ? I was thinking of starting with "Why I believe
Open-Source/Free Software is the disruptive movement of our time" - I
suspect MS has a different view.
> Of course, such a debate is possible provided I can get the funding
> to go there, and I realize that you and I, just like many other
> contributors, are facing this problem.
Book early to save :-)
> See my first comment: provided that the community as a whole is
> invited, it is a Regicon, yes.
Honestly, substance concerns me far more than branding; do call it what
you will; all are welcome - the content will be ~exclusively technical.
Regards,
Michael.
[1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_Kernel_Developers_Summit
+ sadly invitation only, not my preferred approach.
[2] - http://live.gnome.org/BostonSummit
[3] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parliamentary_debate
--
[EMAIL PROTECTED] <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
