:: Re: [devuan-dev] Of confidence and …
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Autor: Rick Moen
Datum:  
To: devuan-dev, dng
Betreff: Re: [devuan-dev] Of confidence and support and the future of Devuan.
Dan, it is _not_ time for you to leave. Please stay.

I've seen only the public portions of these text-format interactions,
but think I'm seen enough data to assess the basic situation. Although
I'm a friendly outsider to Devuan Project governance, I've seen many
similar destructive spirals in open source projects over many decades:
It starts with well-intended individual actions taken without adequate
consultation, which cause reactions from other parties who feel taken by
surprise. When those reactions are in e-mail, or (slightly worse) in
e-mail with a large audience such as on mailing lists, then a
communication anti-pattern tends to take hold that drives the parties
into confrontation, frustration, and perception of harm that could have
been resolved if the parties had switched to more-interactive,
more-personal, and less public means of communication -- such as voice
telephone or Internet video conferencing.

As to Denis/Jaromil's comments about the ci.devuan.org failure, yes, he
spoke sharply to you about some of your initial steps, but, if you
review what he said, the main points were that (1) better consultation
should have occurred throughout and (2) he asked you to wait before
taking additional action. IMO, if you set aside for a moment the tinge
of personal accusation you're perceiving in what he wrote, you will see
that those are reasonable comments from a project-management
perspective.

Back when I was manager of a department of system administrators, I
told my employees that I'd shield them from problems visited onto our
department from other parts of the firm and help their professional
development, and in return I asked and expected two things: (1)
Do their assigned share of our work, but equally important, (2) make
sure I was never blindsided about anything they did, i.e., if there
was bad news in which they were involved, I expected to hear it from
them first and immediately, not later or from anyone else.

Devuan Project of course differs in being less-hierarchical not to
mention volunteer, but good and timely communication is every bit as
important if not more so, and the antipatterns I've seen lately appear
to _all_ involve failure to do timely consultation, and then reliance on
known-problematic _asynchronous_ communication methods such as e-mail /
mailing lists that are inadequate to the situation and tend to worsen
interpersonal conflict, avoidably.

Devuan has suffered enough loss, and I wish everyone would please
de-escalate and to understand that e-mail is not the right solution for
all communication needs, especially where there is risk of
contentiousness and hard feelings.

And you belong here, and would be greatly missed.


-- 
Cheers,                          "I am not a vegetarian because I love animals; 
Rick Moen                        I am a vegetarian because I hate plants."
rick@???                                    -- A. Whitney Brown
McQ! (4x80)