As a European who is frequently annoyed with both the harshness of some Europeans, as well as the oversensitiveness for criticism from Americans, I agree with both Frederik and Mikel.
I do read a clear out-group perspective in how Christoph wrote about this subject. This to me is still strange. In the Belgian community we never had such a devision, because many of our core craftmappers (derogatory term, but quite descriptive, isn't it?) are heavily involved with HOT-style mapping. And of course we have Jorieke and Ben to glue it all together. But I agree that American sensitivity to these kinds of issues can be quite over the top. Sometimes it feels if you don't start a critisism of something without "that's absolutely amazing, but...", then you are being a negative person. Europeans tend to be less fluffy about things, if not for cultural reasons, maybe because English is usually our second (or third) language. Since I'm talking in clichés anyway, I'll add that Americans seem to have less experience with dealing with other cultures. As Belgians, we know that Germans, Brittons, French and Dutch are all slightly crazy compared to us. And we take that into account when they do weird stuff. Americans get less of a chance to gain that sort of experience, at least when coupled with a language barrier too. So in short: - assume we're all friends - try to write in a friendly way - don't read a message from someone from a different culture in the same way you would read a message from your colleague
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