Comments on: Community Filtering and Disagreeableness

By: Aoirthoir An Broc

Aoirthoir An Broc — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 22:48:57 +0000

Martin, yes:) Thankfully I’m not a republocrat. I’m independent.

By: Martin Owens

Martin Owens — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 19:47:00 +0000

You do know that republicans aren’t allowed on my blog ;-P

By: Aoirthoir An Broc

Aoirthoir An Broc — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 18:29:03 +0000

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.

By: Martin Owens

Martin Owens — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 02:36:12 +0000

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.

By: Emmet Hikory

Emmet Hikory — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 02:10:42 +0000

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.

By: Paul Kishimoto

Paul Kishimoto — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 00:59:43 +0000

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.

By: Bruno Girin

Bruno Girin — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 00:59:03 +0000

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

By: Burzmali

Burzmali — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 18:07:37 +0000

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.

By: Stuart

Stuart — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 18:06:16 +0000

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.

By: Jimbo

Jimbo — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 17:25:14 +0000

“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.