Software Developers & the Salon
Source : Lion Kimbro's Blog
I wish that the software development world were like the Evolutionary Salon.
If something is very much not right in your world at the Evolutionary Salon, the solution is obvious: When everyone’s sitting in a circle, you just stand up, and speak your piece. If people really aren’t getting it, you can pull a “J” (he doesn’t want his full name listed,) and just beg, plead, crawl around on the floor, and shout at people: “GIVE IT AWAY! OPEN SOURCE! IF YOU’RE REALLY SERIOUS HERE, JUST GIVE IT AWAY!”
In these Salon’s, people actually listen. And they respond.
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On the Internet, it’s just: Somebody else’s problem.
“Oh, Lion’s on his 5th year of working on Local Names. And he’s having another rant. Oh well, that’s sad to hear.”
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That is, at the Evolutionary Salon, for whatever reason, we have this culture where you listen and you respond. The salon is highly inclusive — if there’s somebody who’s needs are not being met, the group struggles to find some way of responding to that. I’ve seen the miracle of that, several times over. I could only afford $100; Somebody paid most of my way through, and I was only asked for $75. (The whole expense was somewhere between $200-$500.) People volunteered a room for me.
When one man said he’d put a ton of money into his project, and it wasn’t going anywhere, a bunch of people volunteered to help him out, figure out where he’s going with it.
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Contrast with a mailing list on a standards development group on the Internet:
If you can ignore or kill an idea, that’s one man less standing: GOOD.
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And that precludes the idea of trying to help incorporate labor, somehow. By “incorporating labor,” I mean: trying to figure out how to make sure that people’s projects are going, and that something is happening for that person.
This goes back to what I was trying to get out before: “What if I’m wrong?”
Well, ideally, if Local Names is such a horrendous idea, then someone would say: “Your idea is deeply wrong for reason X. But what’s important here, is that we value your labor, and we value that you want to do things for people’s benefit. We’d like to invite you to work on (related) Y, or (related) Z. We’d like to include you in the process. We’d like to make sure you’re working on valuable things.”
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Right? See? And that kind of elimination rounds thing (for some perverse, twisted reason,) is systematic. The goal of all these little mailing lists is to make sure that a particular, single standard, is left standing.
Really, the vision is straight out of Mad Max: It’s two man enter, one man leave. Make no mistake, it’s Thunderdome!
We’re about as far away from the Salon as imaginable.
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So, what is that “perverse” reason? I think it’s the medium. I think it’s perverse that we develop software in these horrendous online forums. It may be perverse, even, that we develop software in our fragmented free time. I don’t know, really.
John Abbe, in his stay here, mentioned that he hadn’t had much success doing NVC in e-mail.
Perhaps it’s not possible for us to have Fair Process until our communications technology is simple enough and easy enough to get on the same page, and have several long real-time meetings with full voice support, and the calendaring software to get us on the same page together, so that we’re all there at the same time.
I think we like to flatter ourselves a lot, that it’s all “humans.” But the reality is that our mediums and systems and what not make that impossible. It’s 95% technology and systems, in my book; We exert the humanity we have in that 5%, and try to make our systems receptive to the human touch. (You try to get that 95% in machinery, and then make the user interface the 5%.)
(Anti-technologists don’t get it: Even a conference hall is a technology, as is all the ritual and framework and stylings around it. It’s all technology.)
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Anyways, just some things to think about.
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As a group, the group of Free Software / Open Source / Web developers, we need to care for our own.
We need to figure out how to make sure not just that software gets developed, but that software developers are happy, that they are recognized, that they are having a good time.
And it’s wrong to just think about the developers here: We want the users in this as well. We want to extend our invitation to users everywhere, and we want the users to feel welcome to participate, to listen, to speak what they’d like, to be present.
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Perhaps what I’m talking about is different than Sunir Shah’s idea of “Fair Process.”
Perhaps what I’m talking about is “Human Process.”
I can imagine an event like the Salon, for web software developers. Large group open face meetings, breakout sessions, group responsiveness, accountability, users and developers.
This is actually different than the Camps, which I have very high hopes for. There’s nothing wrong with the camps; They are great, high bandwidth, places for meeting up and getting some face time.
But Camps don’t really have a sense of “responsibility to others.” It’s full of opportunity, yes, but there’s no network of obligation.
Many people would say this is a positive. I would have said that it was a positive, if I hadn’t participated at the Evolutionary Salon. But now I feel differently. (This is not to criticize the current Camp movement, in any way, which I am deeply excited about.)
Hmm… I’m going to think about this one for a while.
Lion
le 21.01.06 à 20:39
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