On Mon, Nov 25, 2002 at 11:56:30PM +0000, Greg McCarroll said:
> Of course not everyone suffers from this, Leon and Lucy spring to mind
> as two people who transfer their personality well to IRC. However two
> of the candidates are perhaps perceived extremely incorrectly by
> people who do not know them personally, namely, David and Richard
Also Paul can be very, errm, pessimistic? bitter? humbuggy? on IRC but,
IMO anyway, has been an excellent leader of mongers and herder of cats
through what has actually been a fairly odd time for this group.
As Greg said
IRC!=Life
London.pm has been going for nearly 5 years now and I think it's safe to
say that it's been excpetionally successful. One can measure this in
three ways -
1. The 'old guard' are still around
2. There is plenty of young blood (fresh meat, BRAAAAAAAAAAAAANES)
3. It has achieved an awful lot (for start we currently contribute
approximately 5% of CPAN)
I am alos on an Information Architects mailing list which has recently
had a very bitter and personal flame war. Like Perl there are several
luminaries in the field who speak at all the conferences, write all the
books and who are cited in papers. These movers and shakers recently
started up a subscription based institute of Information Architecture
(http://www.aifia.org/).
This sparked a flame war. I can't remember the exact reason but the
feeling of one side was that there was a clique running the IA world
(which seems to be much smaller than the Perl world) and that this was
unhealthy. Things got personal. My perception was that the root of the
problem was that people didn't feel that the institute or the cabal were
doing bad things per se, it was more that they felt that there was never
any chance for them to become part of the cabal. Or atleast have an
affect on the direction of the profession.
I hope that Perl in general and London.pm in particular don't have this
problem and, from my point of view, it doesn't seem like they do
although I'd be interested to hear (off list if desired) if people do
feel that way.
This post has kind of gone nowhere.
I'll shut up now.
Simon
