Community Filtering and Disagreeableness
This is an interesting comment to a previous blog post of mine:
I think there is a huge problem with the routes to contribution. There is a zero-requirement entry to Launchpad and Brainstorm, meaning that the small proportion of useful contributions are swamped by noise.
Ubuntu would benefit from a route to contribution that filtered interested and committed third parties capable of significant contributions. An excellent example of filtered contribution would be the recent article on kernel patching in Linux Format magazine (http://www.linuxformat.co.uk/archives).
In a practical regard I’m very impressed with the shear scale of development that the Linux kernel project manages to organise. It does have a very effective set of mechanisms for filtering contributions that intend to reduce noise and promote useful contribution over general chatter.
But, from my observations and the observations of other people, these filters primarily work through a social principle of being loud, obnoxious, aggressive and arrogant. Not to say that everyone is like that, but the culture certainly promotes those aspects. I don’t like contributing to the kernel project and I wonder why anyone else would bother to either. But that’s where the filtering comes in, you drive away so many people who would like to contribute, that only those who are hell bent on achieving a goal or are contractually obliged to would put up with it.
I remember asking an female kernel hacker (works for a big firm) one time about her experiences. I was rest assured that if it wasn’t for her companies requirement to work with the kernel project, that she would have no desire to contribute normally.
The Ubuntu community is quite different, the CoC means we can’t use unfriendly officious nastiness as a technical filter for poor contributors. We have to be a little better with our social skills, we have to encourage people, educate them and at the same time engage in tough love honesty so contributors know they’re work isn’t up to the standard, but we’d like them to continue to improve on it.
A hard balance to strike.
What are your thoughts?
Tags: linux kernel, projects, social, Ubuntu
“There is a zero-requirement entry to Launchpad and Brainstorm, meaning that the small proportion of useful contributions are swamped by noise.”
The whole point of Brainstorm is to be a platform for the great unwashed to be able to contribute ideas, because of that is it based from the ground up to facilitate filtering out the good ideas and to bury bad ideas. For this person to talk about Brainstorm in the same context of Launchpad is folly. They are aimed at completely different segments of the community with different aims.
I am sure there are plenty of experienced programmers and designers who use Ubuntu, who could contribute to Ubuntu, who simply do not bother for precisely this reason.
If you use an application, segfault it and repair the source code, there really is no obvious mechanism to feed that (one-off) effort back to the community. And there really are people who find that the effort of submitting a fix is far greater than creating the fix.
This kind of user is not likely to contribute through Launchpad or Brainstorm.
The downside of Ubuntu’s acceptance of anything is that our bug backlog is astronomically. It’s one of the areas I would love to help with, but I am daunted by the size of the backlog and the rather steep learning curve for getting involved.
Burzmali, if you are really interested in helping out with triaging bugs, you can request a mentor to help you get started: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/BugSquad/Mentors
For an interesting perspective on politics, replace “the (Linux) kernel project” with “democratic government” in your first two paragraphs. The “contractually obliged” would, I guess, be lobbyists.
For the “swamped by noise” effect, there’s usually ways to deal with things through social controls. I’m a big fan of solutions based on conepts involving Dunbar’s NUmber, and was coincidentllay reading http://www.lifewithalacrity.com/2005/03/dunbar_altruist.html yesterday, which suggests that for very large communities (e.g. brainstorm users), one maximises cooperation when there is some social cost to those who are not participating in moderation. Mind you, there are banalnces: I have separately read that as groups of other primates grow, social grooming (for which we can potentially substitude language or moderation or something) can take nearly 50% of each individuals time. Above this limit, the society typically fractures due to social pressures (at which point it’s better to develop hierarchies to help multiple cooperative societies (I like the term “Tribes”) to participate togther, which offers extended scaling (if 10% of members of each “tribe” participate in cross-tribe discussions and social interaction, and are also very visible in moderation within their tribe, the entire society can have 10 times as many members with the same level of identity sends and coorperation that one can have in a non-hierarchical structure.
Note that while I favour hierarchies in terms of managing social grooming costs, I believe we separately need to maintain a governance framework that prevents such hierarchies used for social grooming from becoming perceived as oppressive to some tribes, which simply fosters revolt. Inclusivity is key, even when we can’t all afford the time required for the level of social involvement required to all know and trust each other.
Trust you Emmet to come in with Dunbar’s number.
I agree with a lot of what your saying and it’s fairly advanced stuff too. Glad you brought it up as sometimes I don’t want to swamp my readers with jargon, but perhaps more people should be more aware of Dunbar social limits and tribe to tribe mechanics.
We actually have hierarchies in our community, so perhaps they help. But I notice they are also causing mistrust over some issues, misunderstandings with others and some interesting conspiracy theory memes.
Actually I prefer the loud noises to the ridiculous rules. If I am contributing a fix for something, my politeness is irrelevant. If on the other hand you are using my program, and you want me to listen to your bug fix suggestions, right now I have to agree to your rules. Rules which sound great in concept, basically saying be cool with each other. But rules which get twisted into “we must be family friendly! NO SWEARING! DONT BE A REPUBLICAN! and other silly nonsense.
So I’ll take the noise and not care if anyone knows about my contribution, over these controls.
You do know that republicans aren’t allowed on my blog ;-P
Martin, yes:) Thankfully I’m not a republocrat. I’m independent.