On Sunday 10 February 2008 09:48:46 am Bryen wrote:
There's also the chronic problem in any political situation. Supporters tend to be less vocal than dissenters. Assuming that is the case here, I would venture to guess many here have supported the Board's actions of late. And quite honestly, I would be somewhat embarrassed by any outsiders looking in on our discussion here and seeing that we have people who object to what amounts to a virtual pat on the back by the Board of openSUSE's contributors. And that's really what all this boils down to. The Board wants to show appreciation. And I, frankly, appreciate the Board's appreciation.
Me too. I don't see this as much more than sign of formal recognition to people that are active helping openSUSE community. Though, maybe naming should be adjusted to reflect that is just the same as 'honor roll' in US schools. It gives no additional rights, it doesn't make you school representative in official sense, it is just plain "we (the openSUSE community) like what you are doing and this is our way to say thank you". I really can't see much reason to object and to refuse email address. It will not change real status for a bit, but it will be, just as honor roll is schools, motivational factor and to the extent responsibility, to keep that way. People with long tradition with SuSE, SUSE, openSUSE don't need this kind of motivation and recognition. They were motivated in different way for all those years they contributed to SUSE and they will probably (hopefully) not change now. The SUSE at the time they started was different, there was no formal community, and recognition was, just as the community itself, informal peer recognition. You could go in and out at any time without any adverse effect to your reputation or status. Though, times are different, first, there is formal community and todays kids want some recognition like 'honor roll' that almost everybody can achieve with work (no need for special qualification, talents and persistence), but they want it now, not in 10 years. To bring them in any online community has to offer some not so hard to achieve recognition, and more than that, has to develop different levels of recognition, recognition for different activities (IRC, mail list help, wiki, popularization, etc), etc. It means also that there is need to encourage people to start maintaining project, not as it is now to disappear without any consequence. I would like that everybody look in http://en.opensuse.org/Code_of_Conduct#Bibliography it may bring us to some common ground. I had time to read http://shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html and it seems, by the symptoms, that we are entering phase where more formal stuff has to be introduced to keep people working in interest of community, not to brake it down. To feel responsible for actions. If there are other, or better, articles about online communities, specially those around opensource development I would like to read them too. BTW, as I check recent changes on openSUSE wiki daily, I can see increase in number of people that create personal pages, ie. don't want to be anonymous. I guess that this trend has something to do with recent actions. -- Regards, Rajko. See http://en.opensuse.org/Portal --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org