[openstack-dev] [election][tc]Question for candidates about global reachout

Samuel Cassiba samuel at cassi.ba
Tue Sep 18 15:20:28 UTC 2018


On Tue, Sep 18, 2018 at 5:34 AM Jeremy Stanley <fungi at yuggoth.org> wrote:
>
> On 2018-09-18 10:23:33 +0800 (+0800), Zhipeng Huang wrote:
> [...]
> > Jeremy, what I'm saying here, and also addressed in comments with
> > the related resolution patch, is that personality reasons are the
> > ones that we have to respect and no form of governance change
> > could help solve the problem. However other than that, we could
> > always find a way to address the issue for remedies, if we don't
> > have a good answer now maybe we will have sometime later.
> >
> > Preference on  social tooling is something that the technical
> > committee is able to address, with isolation of usage of
> > proprietary tools for certain scenario and also strict policy on
> > enforcing the open source communication solutions we have today as
> > the central ones the community will continue to use. This is not
> > an unsolvable problem given that we have a technical committee,
> > but personality issues are, no matter what governance instrument
> > we have.
>
> Once again, I think we're talking past each other. I was replying to
> (and quoted from) the provided sample rejection letter. First I
> wanted to point out that I had already rejected the premise earlier
> on this thread even though it was suggested that no rejection had
> yet been provided. Second, the sample letter seemed to indicate what
> I believe to be a fundamental misunderstanding among those pushing
> this issue: the repeated attempts I've seen so far to paint a
> disinterest in participating in wechat interactions as mere
> "personal preference," and the idea that those who hold this
> "preference" are somehow weak or afraid of the people they'll
> encounter there.
>
> For me, it borders on insulting. I (and I believe many others) have
> strong ideological opposition to participating in these forums, not
> mere personal preferences.
> --
> Jeremy Stanley
>

It is incredibly difficult to convey intent over primarily text-based
mediums, of which I primarily interact with individuals I've never
seen in-person. What is my ideological principle, is someone's
personal preference, isn't even a thought to yet another.

I work within other FLOSS projects outside of OpenStack. With some, my
primary interactions take place over Slack, because they made the
conscious choice to hoist their user community to a free instance,
nominating people to an ambassador role for keeping their message
intact on IRC. Other times, it's over GitHub, where the whole
interaction takes place within the one platform.

Within OpenStack, some people I've only ever worked with through code
reviews or bug reports. Others, IRC or email. People are going to
gravitate toward what makes sense for them, but that's where the lines
between ideology and preference blur.

Agreeing to keep the important lines of communication to a certain
medium is the preference here, but it's also the ideological belief.
The debates ongoing are not Wechat versus Twitter versus IRC versus
Slack. It's over keeping the intent of being open, which is defined in
the very namesake.

Many moons ago, Chef OpenStack was advised to actively eschew video
meetings before being approved to being an OpenStack project under the
Big Tent experiment during the rise of the hype. This happened,
despite the active actions for openness and inclusiveness into the
weekly video meetings, because there was no text record to reference.
This, in turn, resulted in fewer and fewer developers being able to
justify having an hour a week to 'mess around' on IRC, and thus the
hastening of the deflationary period. With a video running, it was more
reasonable to being able to justify an hour to a conference room or an
office to further the intent of openness in the community.

I directly see the benefit in having a means to reach the greater
community (hi! o/) but I do not directly see the correlation in
defining a given social platform as being The Platform for Relevant
Communications beyond email or code review. Email and code review are,
by far, the most accessible points around the globe.

For the Horde^Wcode,

Samuel Cassiba (scas)



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