Forum OpenACS Q&A: Re: Bootstrapping OpenACS governance

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Posted by Lamar Owen on
For quite some time, the guidelines for contributing to PostgreSQL included the clause "follow the hackers mailing list for six months before tackling projects" -- the purpose of which was to give time to not only become familiar with the code itself, but to become familiar with the developers and their personalities.  I must admit to having broken this guideline, which caused some grief for me and others early on in my involvement with PostgreSQL (as it's all archived, you can see me put my foot in my mouth on tape delay... 😊)  In hindsight I wish I had followed that rule to the letter.  At a minimum, one needs to follow the community for a full release cycle to get familiar, unless there are overriding reasons, and unless the person in question has a very thick skin (which I do).

I do agree with Joel that sometimes what could have easily been resolved with a vote becomes personal.  I have seen, however, where the vote itself became personal (from my news.admin days of running a Usenet site).  And I have seen people react very strongly to being voted down.

But I have also seen things be very civil, particularly in the PostgreSQL community (which is the community I know best).  There is of course some vitriol sometimes; but it is infrequent (at least until the next discussion on 'why not GPL?' or 'Upgrading PostgreSQL hosed my database!')....

But having a simple 'this was the vote of the core team' be the end of it does have a certain finality that an informal approach cannot match.  And this is a definite balancing act -- one I believe the PostgreSQL, Tcl, and AOLserver Core Teams are doing well at for their respective communities.  Along these lines, to prevent it from becoming personal, I would like to see an adaptation of the Survey module be employed to take these votes, with the results being anonymous.  Yes, anonymous.

Joel, Peter, and especially Don; thank you for bringing this to the community in this way.  This discussion is quite fascinating, in that it elucidates what has been the operating mode for some time.