A few days ago, I made the statement below and received a generally
robust and unapologetic response. I don't want to rehash this again,
but this tipped the balance for me and I decided to finish off my work
with Apache and hand over. What has somewhat surprised me and this is
the issue that I want to flag up the the PPMC in this note, is the
volume and tone of the general responses that I received when I let the
forums know of my decision to hand over and stand down.
In essence my concerns and fears seem to be shared by most of the NL
admins, moderators and volunteers that staff the forums and do over 90%
of the work to respond to end users. Until this last week my views were
probably at the more positive end of the spectrum. If this happens then
we aren't going to be left with any functioning forums, so I am starting
to consider quite seriously why I am continuing to do this work at all.
Please consider taking active steps:
* To realise that these people spend all of their pro-bono time
working in the forum model and generally hate using email for
anything other than 1-1 communication. We need to have a mutually
efficient way of working together.
* To understand that the forums are a well oiled machine that are
administered tightly and efficiently and have been for years.
Please understand how the system works and what its strengths and
weakness are, before demanding changes.
* Please don't demand, but provide rational explanations for the
need to change and use sensible change management to change
working policies and practices.
* Reach out and consider how to work with people for whom English is
a second language, who find it hard work to read a simple and well
formatted document or post and who just cannot follow complex
email threads that are a dozen levels deep and get completely
mangled by some respondents:
o Keep thread simple and maintain thread discipline
o Try to give direct answers to direct questions
o All participants configure their email clients to use
"text/plain; format=flowed" encoding, as "text/plain" only
can completely mangle nesting of reply content.
Of course the PPMC doesn't have to do any of this, but also please
accept my parting advice that if you don't then you are effectively and
knowingly killing the forums off. At some point these people will have
decide whether to stay and tough it out; to leave one-by-one; or to take
this service elsewhere.
Regards Terry Ellison
------------------------------------------------------------------------
On 01/09/11 23:02, Terry Ellison wrote:
Quite honestly -- and I can only speak personally -- at the moment I
feel that I am caught between a rock and a hard place. My work is
time consuming and the skills are different to the mainstream C++
trained OOo developer, but they are also different to a pure
sysAdmin. In some ways you need to be an expert in *both* these
worlds and to be able to integrate this expertise. I am not talking
about enthusiastic newbie volunteers; I am talking about hacks who
have done this so many times that it's routine. Again this only my
personal experience, but I feel that Apache is unwelcoming to
newcomers and this seems to be an endemic culture, albeit strongly
advocated by a few individuals. It is intolerant and often outrightly
hostile to domains of expertise outside its comfort area -- even
though these may be more relevant to the work and Apache's wider
mission. In short I am being asked to work long hours on technically
demanding tasks in a dysfunctional environment. If I was being paid
to do what I am doing now, then I would be seriously thinking about
changing jobs -- and this is from a guy who spent 32 years working
with the same company working to get to its top technical tier -- and
also one who is now doing this work pro-bono
