On Mon, Aug 03, 2026 at 04:08:17PM +0200, Aleksandra Fedorova wrote:
> Hi, folks,
>
> tl;dr
>
> Please share the specific tips or the links to your favorite How-To's for
> the style of effective communication on the mailing list and outside of it.
[...]
> But there should be more.
>
> Do you have links to some good ones? Or do you want to share your own
> snippet or two which could be included in the new doc?
FWIW, I wrote this some 10+ years ago when we were just bootstrapping
the OpenStack RDO project. This was about communicating on IRC (which
might give away a bit of my age ;-))
https://www.rdoproject.org/community/irc-etiquette/
Most of it still applies if we replace "IRC" with Matrix, Discourse,
list, whatever. Some of it has gotten worse. I still see many
behaviours listed here below on Matrix, lists, and elsewhere
(particularly impatience).
Copy/pasting verbatim from the above, without any edits or clean-ups:
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
- Try to ask smart questions, let us try to think for ourselves first
and not let some poor, good-intentioned soul to do all the thinking
for us. [Pro-tip: Eric S. Raymond's guide referred in the Resources
section]
- Try (as humanly as possible) to be: clear, concrete, specific and
complete with your statements/questions. People cannot read your
mind.
- Be patient: do not expect people will devote time for extreme
hand-holding. If a URL is pointed, please try things yourself, do
your home-work, use Google effectively.
- Try to maintain a balance of taking vs giving from the community. Do
not demand excessive attention.
- IRC is a DIY environment, not a paid-support forum. If someone
responds to you, that is a bonus.
- Be reminded: respect people's time, always answering IRC questions
isn't developers first priority. Someone could be knee deep in
gdb/pdb investigating that time-critical bug.
- When in a community environment, just post the question to the
channel, you do not have to ping a specific person just because
he/she answered your question before. Nor do you have to ask
questions like "Anyone alive on this channel?" "Are you using ABC?"
Stay channel topic related!
- It is an international channel: you may get better responses in
certain time-zones, be patient - don't count on instant reactions.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
--
Kashyap Chamarthy / Red Hat / RISC-V and Fedora
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