OSCON keynote: Standing out in the crowd

Posted Jul 28, 2009 3:00 UTC (Tue) by Skud (guest, #59840)
In reply to: OSCON keynote: Standing out in the crowd by smadu2
Parent article: OSCON keynote: Standing out in the crowd

"How can anyone feel out of place to subscribe to mailing lists, participate in the discussions, and start posting patches etc? Thats where most if not all stuff happens."

Many mailing lists and IRC channels have a quite aggressive culture, unwelcoming to newcomers. Others have a culture where sexist comments or "humour" is allowed. Some open source forums have even had people posting death threats against women in open source. See, eg, http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/07/03/debian_death_thre...

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OSCON keynote: Standing out in the crowd

Posted Jul 28, 2009 3:44 UTC (Tue) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link] (4 responses)

The flip side, however, is some sort of a thoughts police. If somebody did something stupid, not telling her about it is equally as bad.

OSCON keynote: Standing out in the crowd

Posted Jul 28, 2009 8:02 UTC (Tue) by njs (subscriber, #40338) [Link] (2 responses)

We are not obliged to pick between death threats or Orwellian thought police. There are other options.

No-one's saying "when you see people being wrong you should pretend that everything is just fine!" You might notice that plenty of people in this discussion are happy to argue their points quite vigorously :-). But it is possible -- sometimes difficult, sometimes taking more time than one necessarily has, I know -- to help someone in a way that is, well, helpful.

OSCON keynote: Standing out in the crowd

Posted Jul 28, 2009 9:27 UTC (Tue) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link] (1 responses)

And maybe I do things just for fun. And maybe "a community" is not my primary concern.

OSCON keynote: Standing out in the crowd

Posted Jul 29, 2009 0:58 UTC (Wed) by njs (subscriber, #40338) [Link]

I didn't say anything about communities or your motivations for doing things, so... uh... is this a response and you accidentally left out the part that makes it responsive, or are just changing the subject, or... what?

Also, I'm not sure how to say this: Reading over this thread, the only way I can make *some* kind of sense of what you've written is as saying that aggression and sexism, up to and including death threats, are things you do for fun. I'm pretty sure that's not what you *mean* to say, but... you might want to read things over and think about how to say what you do mean, if that's not it?

OSCON keynote: Standing out in the crowd

Posted Jul 28, 2009 22:16 UTC (Tue) by smadu2 (guest, #54943) [Link]

exactly! If I do/say something stupid (technically) - I would want people to correct me ... else I see no point for me to be a part of that group ...

OSCON keynote: Standing out in the crowd

Posted Jul 29, 2009 2:14 UTC (Wed) by Baylink (guest, #755) [Link]

Yes, one.

Especially if not more than one, you're making an *awfully* large amout of stew from one oyster.

I'll fall back on the statistical noise argument I made earlier: there is almost *no* statistical extrapolation that is likely to be safe to make about "the entire FOSS community" because it is so flippin small.