I am not talking about a formal role or official title at this time, and > I am not interested in "competing" for such a role or title. I am > interested in helping the group become more productive, specifically > regarding the user guides. > > I'd like to point out that I informally filled the role of "user guide > team leader" at OpenOffice.org for 5 or 6 years before I had any sort of > official title. Why should I not do the same here, if others (except for > you) have said they want me to do so? > > IMO a formal title is fairly irrelevant within the project, although it > can be useful when talking with outsiders who expect hierarchy even when > there is none. On those occasions in OOo I would call myself "Lead > Editor", which fairly accurately described my role. > > --Jean > > @ ALL:
We of the Brazilian community have just recently "enjoyed" a big fight over the "who is who" inside the community (culminating with the extinction of the NGO BrOffice). What I have learned is this: 1) People work in FOSS because of some sort of recognition by their peers (or by people they think are their peers). This brings out the best and worst of everybody (ego is a dangerous two sided dagger). So people enjoy the feeling that *THEY* did something, this is so true that LibO has a tracking system to show who is the most active in developing patches and in the Wiki / l10n. And as such people start thinking things as theirs (my contribution, my translation, my team, my work, my precious ;). But this all is not ours, we have forfeit our right to call it ours when we registered with the project and accepted the GNU / CC license. 2) People will try to undermine somebody who tries to take a leading role, it is instinctive: "someone is trying to be my boss, but wait! ... I got into this thing so I didn't have to say 'yes sir' anymore". And this is true and valid, I for one will not tolerate being bossed around even for a fraction of my free time. But without some sort of accountability, and without some sort of "master map" we are all going to step on each others toes (believe me ... we had 3 persons translating the same chapter of the GS guide ... what a waist of time and resources and what a bummer for the newcomers). 3) This kind of discussion may seem very tiresome (and I for one agree it is just that), but organizing the work-flow, and the roles of our member base is very important ... and must be done FIRST ... even if it takes a few man-hours away from the actual practical job at hand. I am not putting one minute of my free time in the documentation effort until I see a work-flow (I have too little free time to waist on a project I am not convinced that will be of any value) 4) Voting on the way we think things should get done is THE BEST way for everybody to get satisfied. We had votes on people who were registered users of our discussion lists, but voting within the "actual workforce" is best (get the GS guides and see who did what, those people's votes should be more important than anyone else's) 5) This thing was supposed to be FUN ... a little useful, but mostly FUN ... you see, documentation will be for a minority of users, most of them will work with basic on-hands knowledge of the product. And then there is the wiki and the users mailing list ... the companies that will make the transition to our software will do (at least the majority of them) a in-house training of some sort. We start out as being EXPENDABLE, our work is futile and is outdated as soon as we print it ... but am I with all this, still having FUN? Sure, so I continue ... when it seems to much like work, I'll get out the same day. This is not to say that any of you are right or wrong, but we need to get our speech in the same wave length. But just to make my point perfectly clear: This discussion is happening because people think the project is THEIRS (or at leas that they are PART of it) when the actual situation is that we are DONATING time and work to the project, we are not the project (and that is a good thing, or the hole project would stop if we weren't here any more). So ... are YOU still having FUN ? Rogerio -- Unsubscribe instructions: E-mail to documentation+h...@libreoffice.org Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/www/documentation/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
