Promoting new members

[Matthew East]

Emma,

In your email you criticise me for providing "a minutiae of inline
comments". What you've done in your email is twist quite a lot of
things and make quite a lot of false statements, but you're
essentially preventing me from responding to them by suggesting that
responding in detail to specific points is the wrong thing to do.
That's devious. So, I'm sorry, but I'm going to respond to some of
your allegations, in particular given that they are quite personal.

However, I will be stepping back from discussions from now on, as I'll
explain at the end of this email.

On Tue, Apr 21, 2009 at 3:29 PM, Emma Jane <emmajane at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> I could paste you the number of times that I've suggested something I'd like
> to work on and been told why it's a bad idea. So I just go back to playing on
> the Wiki and making screen casts on for other teams. If you, Matthew, can't
> figure out how to engage a published author with multiple years of DocBook and
> technical writing experience, you're doing it wrong.

To test my own sanity, I've searched my gmail archive of your posts to
the list in the past. Aside from two small patches which I merged, the
serious suggestions that I've seen you make are proposals to
contribute to the StyleGuide and the Gnome accessibility guide. In
both of those cases your proposal was welcomed and encouraged (not
just by me, but also by Phil in the case of the StyleGuide), even if
they weren't followed up by you in the end.

> Matthew, have you updated the Wiki to incorporate the
> suggestions I made? Or have you merely torn them apart on the mailing list? I
> still see words like, "a number", "significant" and "understanding." In fact it
> seems as though you /removed/ the "three patch" minimum that Connor and I
> talked about.

Just to set the record straight about this, I removed it because
others in the discussion, including Connor himself, supported keeping
a flexibility. In fact, you have been the only person so far to
suggest a "three patch minimum". However, plenty of people have yet to
comment, and if the consensus of the team is that a minimum number of
patches should be required, I'm happy to be in the minority and
include such a provision. Let's see.

>> There will be... this is waiting on me to review and implement, and
>> things have been quite busy recently. Sorry for the slow response.
>
> Why are you the only person who can do this, Matthew?

Conceivably others could be granted access to the bzr branch from
which changes are synched, indeed it could be made an ~ubuntu-core-doc
branch, but to date no one has asked to help with this. I'm happy if
that could be changed, the burden of updating help.ubuntu.com has
actually been quite time consuming and I'd love some help with it.

>> > 4. Whenever I venture an opinion on the Wiki, well that's guaranteed a
>> > snipe from someone.
>>
>> I'm sorry, I think you are overreacting - I haven't seen any evidence of
>> this.
>
> OY! You just did snipe at him! Right there!

I'm disappointed that the thread has degenerated into this sort of
thing, but "snipe" means to attack a person with petulant, snide or
sarcastic criticism. That's not what I've done.

>> Yes, you're right that often these discussions are focused on a
>> perceived problem. It's us trying to guess what improvements should be
>> made to our internal documentation or processes. Ideally, we'd have
>> loads of feedback from newcomers to the team about what we are doing
>> wrong, things they found difficult to understand, or didn't agree
>> with, and we could evaluate that feedback and act on it. At the
>> moment, we don't have that feedback so we are making a reasonably
>> educated guess at what we can improve.
>
> You ignore the comments that you do get. Just this week Ben gave you comments
> and you told him to wait until it was sorted out.

That's seriously twisting what I said. Actually, what I said was:

"We're aware that the team structure on Launchpad is a bit confusing
at the moment, and we've been discussing how to improve that. I think
you should wait until we've implemented some improvements there, and
then join the applicable team."

That's (a) a frank admission that the aspect that he raised is
confusing, and (b) a promise to improve it. I can't do more than that.
The suggestion to wait was quite simply based around the idea that if
the Launchpad teams will be changing shortly, and teams will be stood
down and new teams created, then there is little point joining a team
in the interim.

> I have received private
> emails and I'm not even a "member of the team." People are telling you
> Matthew, you're just not listening.

Ok, obviously I don't know who has been involved in that, but if there
is a feeling on the part of the team that I'm unfairly dominating
discussions and obstructing the growth or development of the group,
then it's fair to ask me to step back and take a more minor role. I've
given 4 years of volunteering to the group, and while I'm very keen to
continue what I do now, I'll put the interests of the team ahead of
that desire any day of the week.

-- 
Matthew East
http://www.mdke.org
gnupg pub 1024D/0E6B06FF