[prev in list] [next in list] [prev in thread] [next in thread] 

List:       koffice-devel
Subject:    thoughts from community member on a split
From:       Andrij Zinchenko <andrez.the.slacker () gmail ! com>
Date:       2010-10-27 21:06:20
Message-ID: AANLkTinET5TA4synFBf4U03oONdhGAL8XMuKpqdHoyqi () mail ! gmail ! com
[Download RAW message or body]

Good evening (or night) to all KOffice developers!

Here I want to express my opinion on upcoming KOffice split. My
opinion as a member of KOffice community. I have not done much so far
- just couple of Archlinux PKGBUILDS of KOffice betas and some
documentation on userbase
(http://userbase.kde.org/KWord/Manual/IntroGUI).

So, I am not even a developer. But it is namely KOffice made/inspired
me starting contributing. And I was waiting today for Beta 3 and
thinking that I will write more documentation to make this product a
great community product. I was proud to be a member of such a great
community, even though I contribute so little. But than I have read
about the split...

The consequences of the split  from the community member point of view:
1. Less trust - I do not know whom to trust - group A, Group B. And I
do not know if my small documentation contributions are actually of
any need now. And the trust is what the community is built upon.

2. Confusion - I am not the only one who was waiting for the Beta 3.
The confusion of many people now is not about the fact that it does
not arrive on servers, but because no one ever cared to tell the
community what is going on and that the release is postponed. 3 lines
of news on site saying that the release is postponed would not take
much of the time. But withought these 3 lines community feels that no
one cares about communication. Again, this undermines the trust and
the community.

The problems of KOffice community:

I think that the key problem of KOffice as it is now is really bad
communication. Little care is taken so that everybody would be
informed about focuses/opinions and what is going on.

And the very fact that there exist an attempt to hide/restrict the
split in this mailing list also indicates that the communication
atmosphere is not really healthy. Tomorrow all kind of blogs and micro
blogs will say "KOffice splits". Many already did. And when everybody
will discover that there was this hiding attitude - this will be a
HUGE HIT to both KOffice and KDE.  You can never build an open
community by restricting communication over burning topics.

Aaron Seigo have brilliantly described how to solve these kind of problems:
http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2009/09/continuous-communication.html

This split will make a bad impact on KOffice, because it will hurt the
community hard. Moreover, it will hurt the brand of KOffice which is
now getting real strength and looks like a plane heading to take-off.

Please, understand me the right way, I am not trying to blame anyone.
I think, we all, as a community need to communicate better to each
other. If I did not think that way I would just wait for another
release and never care about

IS THERE A POSITIVE WAY OUT?

I think it truly exists. Developers often have their conferences on
writing code, all kinds of  sprints, but they rarely work on solving
human interaction problems among them. And I this is what we got to do
now. We need to have some kind of reconciliation sprint or something
like that.

Why not try to do that? We can have respect to all kinds of opinions,
focuses, agendas. And we can integrate it into a vision that will work
for different parts of the community. We do not need to be totally
homogeneous to reach agreement. Let`s make an open talk which will
include people/groups with different views. Let's invite Nokia and
other interested parties, take a good discussion format and solve this
problem.

As Niclas Luhman said "Only systems that can solve problems previously
unsolvable to them can develop". I think it is time for KOffice
community to solve this problem. And I do not talk about technical
implementation - let it be even 3 groups, but they need to respect and
agree on key things, and their competitions and different agendas must
not ruin the community.

Dear KOffice developers, you are great guys. I am admired by your
work. And I am ready to continue my contributions and attract new
people to make KOffice a great product for everybody. As long as we
keep the community spirit, even if we acknowledge that
we-do-not-really-like-what-some-others-are-saying. We must take our
will together and work on settling this issue, because in 6 month
there might happen another split due to other "objective" reasons.

One more thing I wanted to tell:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g--Vlij1X1Y


regards,
andrez
_______________________________________________
koffice-devel mailing list
koffice-devel@kde.org
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/koffice-devel
[prev in list] [next in list] [prev in thread] [next in thread]