On Wed, Jun 14, 2006 at 10:27:01AM -0600, Aaron J. Seigo wrote: > On Wednesday 14 June 2006 09:52, SAKUMA Junichi wrote: > > In the meeting they talked about harshness in particular about coding > > styles. > > this varies wildly from project to project ... some projects are very good > about this and some (many?), as you note, are not. =/ > > i wonder what could help here ... it's probably a herculean task to change > the > status quo in newbie-unfriendly projects. one might say "let natural > selection do its thing and friendly projects will gather more contributors > and therefore out-develop the unfriendly projects" but that's probably an > overly simplistic view of the competition landscape and certainly loses us > new contributors in the meantime.
Friendly projects don't just happen; you have to make a concerted effort to achieve it. It's easy to be harsh; being friendly takes actual effort. (Although if it helps prevent arguments, it could save effort in the long run...) I suppose it's like GUI's - it's easy to have a bad interface, just slap a few widgets onto a dialog pane and hook up some callbacks. Creating a nice interface takes more skill and attention to details. Unfortunately, politeness is one of those things that is set early in the project, when its culture is first formed. There comes a point where someone says something rude to a user, or someone gets flamed, or an argument starts on irc, or whatever. If you want to have a project be friendly, then that is the point where one of the core team needs to nip it in the bud (don't make a huge deal about it, just state that it's inappropriate for this project). After a few repetitions it gets ingrained in the project's culture. You have to give reinforcement from time to time (it's easier to become more harsh than to become more polite). We did this quite deliberately in Inkscape (having a friendly development community was one of the founding principles.) I also noticed this nip-in-the-bud happened on here on the desktop architect's list early on. I don't know if it's possible to change an existing project's culture; like you said, it'd probably be a huge doing... _______________________________________________ Desktop_architects mailing list Desktop_architects@lists.osdl.org https://lists.osdl.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop_architects
