DoctorMo's Blog

Continuing at a tangent from yesterday’s blog post about design I wanted to quickly address a problem with non-material contributions (i.e. vocal and political contributions) as opposed to programming, design, support, education or any of the other thousands of material contributions in the community ecosystem.

The default seems to be that between weakly relational members of the community we organise ourselves with three tactics: knowing the best people, shouting the loudest and have the most convincing argument.

If your voice isn’t being heard then perhaps it’s because we have far to many rambling personalities posting huge emails to mailing lists or huge posts using complex words like ‘polemic’ several times.

But if all your trying to do is communicate what you want from the computer, what you really aspire to have in the design of the software then it’s best to keep it short and sweet. I don’t think we always need to rationalise our desires and make essays out of them.

Some people do this: “I’d like to see the window buttons on the right again because it would make my life easier.”

Your aspirations?

Recently I learned that an event we’d tentatively been expecting to attend as a group, didn’t happen. But all was quiet and as leader I’d assumed that the organisers has decided that the event couldn’t be run properly so had dropped the idea. but the problem was that we didn’t know.

The problem it turned out was a series of private emails between the two principle organisers who had managed to cross wires and misunderstand each other. Add in complexities of personal histories and the fact that they’ve never met in person and we ended up will a killed event.

So my thoughts were, should the organisation communication have been held in public, on the mailing list? Should that be a standard part of the procedure?

At least if it’s going on in the light of the list’s mailing list we can identify potential conflicts and attempt to defuse problems. If things do explode, then we’d be on hand to help pick up the pieces and salave what we could.

Thoughts?