[Meta] Community

Any sufficiently analysed magic is indistinguishable from science. --Agatha Heterodyne, Girl Genius
http://www.girlgeniusonline.com

The web comic is all about mad genius types too fascinated by their own creations and intelligence to pay much attention to what it is doing to the world around them or to get along with their fellow mad geniuses. Won a Hugo.

I have been spending time with the comic and its fan sites rather than play with squeak and contribute as much as I did to this community.

I stick my nose back in here to find out whats going on. Root for squeaks success. Vote in the recent election.

Write the occasional concerned missive.

I sense a majority of the board are expressing themselves in ways that are distancing a good number of the rest of the community.

I don't remember Ken R Brown being a troll in the past. I even went back and read his previous posts for this month and it seemed to me he had worthwhile stuff to say, current degenerate thread excluded.

Making a blog in the name of the board was a mistake and a misstep in protocol.

Randal's response was to post HERE that he considered it hostile. Not misguided, but hostile. He could also have written to Ken, reprimanding him privately. Instead he posted publicly. Things quickly descended from there.

Bert, Colin, Andreas, chiming in and even gentle Juan posting here apologizing to everyone except Ken for using the F-word.

Pretty successfully driving Ken away.

I have no opinion about whether this was a good or a bad. I am very concerned that in a small community we treat each other so. Even more concerned that this attitude has descended over the community and that it is emanating from our elected leaders.

One of Ken Causey qualities was that he was a gentleman. I happily voted for him each time he ran for a leadership position and was sadden not to have the opportunity this time round.

I strive to find ways to emulate him when dealing with difficult situations and people. I hope that others might care to do the same.

Yours in hope and service, --Jerome Peace





     

>>>>> "Jerome" == Jerome Peace <[hidden email]> writes:

Jerome> Making a blog in the name of the board was a mistake and a misstep in
Jerome> protocol.

Jerome> Randal's response was to post HERE that he considered it hostile. Not
Jerome> misguided, but hostile. He could also have written to Ken,
Jerome> reprimanding him privately. Instead he posted publicly. Things quickly
Jerome> descended from there.

Let's be clear.  Not taking it *down* when asked is what I considered hostile.

--
Randal L. Schwartz - Stonehenge Consulting Services, Inc. - +1 503 777 0095
<[hidden email]> <URL:http://www.stonehenge.com/merlyn/>
Smalltalk/Perl/Unix consulting, Technical writing, Comedy, etc. etc.
See http://methodsandmessages.vox.com/ for Smalltalk and Seaside discussion

Em 20-03-2010 17:33, Jerome Peace escreveu:
Most of time this community shows considerable coherence and
equilibrium. Even when times came that people decided to (partially)
part ways and work in new streams derived from squeak peace was kept.
Many of people who decided to participate in new initiatives kept
colaborating with squeak/trunk/etc. Even if my personal position is that
sometimes forks are counter productive, I have to say that despite of
split effort, last year squeak walked a long distance.

Regarding to mr. Ken, I am really impressed on how democratic and
tolerant the board is. No matter what his past contributions were, since
the launch of trunk he has behaved in a way that's completely non
compatible with a civilized community. He launched loads of personal
attacks against board members and to every reasonable answer he replies
with new aggression sometimes even in improper vocabulary. Now it seems
he decided to bring his misbehavior to a new level creating a blog on
behalf of SOB.

I use Fedora in may day to day life. I just imagine what would happen if
I decided to open a blog or something like that on behalf of FLOSS...
how long it would be until lawyers knock at my door... how long it would
take until I receive a "cease & desist" intimation. Same thing about all
other organizations I know. So, treatment given to mr. Ken is quite
smooth and tolerant.

In fact, if something is trying to tear community apart it is the
behavior of mr. Ken and his missives to this forum. Just imagine
yourself as a n00b entering a forum and... BANG!!! a mega load of bull
s__t & personal accusations targeted to key people of the organization
hitting your face. Probably you would be gone to never come back.

I can understand that much of mr. Ken work must be reworked to fit in
new squeak model. But this kind of stuff happens all the time. It
happens even in well established and stable software environments. It
happened when SunOS became Solaris, when Windows XP became Vista, etc...
And it will happen again. It's how things work. Was he provided of good
sense he would select the most important things to refit. Or do like
other people and launch a new "fork" of squeak. Problem is: he was not
able to herd anybody of the community to his side. In great part due to
his behavior.

So, whatever comes out, I'll not pity Mr. Ken. In fact I would be glad
if he was gone for good...

Best regards,

CdAB

On Mar 20, 2010, at 1:33 PM, Jerome Peace wrote:
>
> Randal's response was to post HERE that he considered it hostile. Not misguided, but hostile. He could also have written to Ken, reprimanding him privately.


How do you know that he didn't?  For instance, my "asshole" post was written after a private exchange with Ken where he made it clear that he didn't think that we was doing anything wrong by continuing to leave the blog up, even though 3 board members had already asked him to take it down by that point.  

If Randal had contacted him personally, he would probably have received these sorts of responses (these aren't direct quotes from Ken, who should correct me if they misrepresent him):
        "Do you even have the authority to ask me to take it down?"
        "Who gives the board the authority to ask me to take it down?"
        "Does one board member have the authority to ask me to take it down, or does it need to be a majority, or unanimous?"
        "Is there a designated board member in charge of communications who should be the one to ask me to take it down?"
        "Why hasn't the board written and posted rules about how it is supposed to handle these sorts of situations?"

Bert had it right when he said early on that "the election has clearly shown that the informal way we operate is generally fine with the community".  Ken is one of the few that is not fine with it, and rather than gracefully accepting the reality, he set up the blog as a passive-aggressive stunt to display his displeasure (at first, I gave his motivations the benefit of the doubt, but I'm now convinced that this was never about working cooperatively with the board).

I appreciate your call for peace and harmony.  However, what should have been done in this case?  More patience is never a bad thing, but I don't think it would have changed the ultimate result in this case.  If Randal had calmly added his request to take the blog down rather than calling it a hostile act, he probably still would have (justifiably) lost his cool when the response was "thank you for your opinion".  Of course, maybe Ken would have reacted differently, and the whole thread would have taken a different path, but it seems unlikely... he seemed quite committed to running his "experiment".

Back to fun hacking...
Josh

>>>>> "Josh" == Josh Gargus <[hidden email]> writes:

Josh> If Randal had contacted him personally, he would probably have received
Josh> these sorts of responses (these aren't direct quotes from Ken, who
Josh> should correct me if they misrepresent him): "Do you even have the
Josh> authority to ask me to take it down?"  "Who gives the board the
Josh> authority to ask me to take it down?"  "Does one board member have the
Josh> authority to ask me to take it down, or does it need to be a majority,
Josh> or unanimous?"  "Is there a designated board member in charge of
Josh> communications who should be the one to ask me to take it down?"  "Why
Josh> hasn't the board written and posted rules about how it is supposed to
Josh> handle these sorts of situations?"

My posting was spurred in part by a parallel conversation with "kbrown" on
freenode#squeak on IRC, which seemed to be the same person posting as Ken
Brown in email.

I admit that out of context, perhaps it looked out of place.

--
Randal L. Schwartz - Stonehenge Consulting Services, Inc. - +1 503 777 0095
<[hidden email]> <URL:http://www.stonehenge.com/merlyn/>
Smalltalk/Perl/Unix consulting, Technical writing, Comedy, etc. etc.
See http://methodsandmessages.vox.com/ for Smalltalk and Seaside discussion

On Mar 20, 2010, at 2:42 PM, Josh Gargus wrote:

>  For instance, my "asshole" post

I feel like I should emphasize that I wasn't calling Ken an asshole.  There are people, often called "griefers", who enjoy causing anger, pain, and frustration for it's own sake... luckily the Squeak community has been free of these (Ken certainly isn't one... he believes that his provocations are helping Squeak).  

My point was that in the absence of actual griefers, we don't need rules about how the board should deal with them.  Andreas was also right to note that we couldn't write anti-griefer laws if we wanted to, since the board has no power of enforcement; all we can do is ignore them.

Cheers,
Josh

On Sat, 2010-03-20 at 13:33 -0700, Jerome Peace wrote:
> One of Ken Causey qualities was that he was a gentleman. I happily
> voted for him each time he ran for a leadership position and was
> sadden not to have the opportunity this time round.

Well, thanks I suppose.  But I cursed up a storm along with the others
and I read Ken's actions as actively hostile and intended to cause
trouble.  If anything I would say I'm just not as inclined to
participate in the discussion here as I should be and so my apparent
gentleness, at least in this case, was misleading.

Ken Causey

On Mar 20, 2010, at 2:47 PM, Randal L. Schwartz wrote:


You're right.  I did read the IRC logs last night, and was clear that Ken had already reacted dismissively by the time you posted to squeak-dev, but forgot about it by the time I wrote the above message.  Sorry for my mischaracterization.

Cheers,
Josh


>
> --
> Randal L. Schwartz - Stonehenge Consulting Services, Inc. - +1 503 777 0095
> <[hidden email]> <URL:http://www.stonehenge.com/merlyn/>
> Smalltalk/Perl/Unix consulting, Technical writing, Comedy, etc. etc.
> See http://methodsandmessages.vox.com/ for Smalltalk and Seaside discussion

Em 20-03-2010 18:58, Ken G. Brown escreveu:
> I believe you have me confused with someone else.
>  
Yes. I beg my apologies. I read Ken and mistake by Keith. Really beg
your pardon... I was in the middle of something else & this kind of
trouble usually was related to other person postings. Will pay closer
attention next time.

Anyways, establishing something (like blogs, etc) on behalf of
organizations (formal or informal) is problematic. Should be voted or
discussed. Here we are among friendly people but even so...

So I'm asking people to forget about the part that mistakes you by other
person and to reafirm that I've never taken you by a troll or anything
like that. (...)
Sorry again.

CdAB

Guy's, we're all wasting our weekend being so meta..  Jerome and Ken,
please, we just had an election here.  This list is our forum, where
you are free to listen and participate, but right now the best way to
help is to let us talk so we can do something we, as a significant
majority, want; to get a 4.1 release out the door for you and the
community.

Please, for message threads that are originated by board members that
appear intended to do work for, the community, such as:

  "Squeak 4.1 release tasks"

Unfortunately, now, our own little "Thread object" that had the nice
title, "Squeak 4.1 release tasks" is wrecked in the ditch before it
even got out of the driveway, per se..

Now we will try again.  I ask you, as a courtesy, if you want to talk
about something else, please start your own new thread with its own
subject.

 - Chris

PS - Ken, I think you had good intentions, but just didn't realize
putting up a blog for someone else is way too heavy-handed.  None of
us on the board would do that without discussing first with the other
elected board members.  The board is not going to spend their limited
resources wrangling together meta procedure "documents" that would
have no binding authority anyway.



On Sat, Mar 20, 2010 at 3:33 PM, Jerome Peace
<[hidden email]> wrote:

On 2010-03-20, at 1:33 PM, Jerome Peace wrote:

> Bert, Colin, Andreas, chiming in and even gentle Juan posting here apologizing to everyone except Ken for using the F-word.

In retrospect, I wish I had been less sarcastic, and focused on the real point, which was articulating the perversity of Ken's position. I apologize to those who were offended. Even Ken. :-)

Colin