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From: | Mats Bengtsson |
Subject: | Re: PDF Problem |
Date: | Tue, 12 May 2009 17:15:33 +0200 |
User-agent: | Thunderbird 2.0.0.5 (X11/20070716) |
I have a couple of friends who are equally driving forces in enthusiastically organizing music organizations for amateur players, one is heading a chamber music society and the other is heading an orchestra. Some people may find them rude since when you come with a suggestion on how things can be changed, the immediate reaction is often an immediate rejection of the idea. Since they have spent so much (unpaid) time on the project, the reaction is natural. Also, I know that they often feel that they don't get enough support from other people in the board or in the organization, but at the same time they are not so good at asking for help and even if somebody has volunteered to assist, they often take care of it themselves to get it done the way they want it. If you recognize yourself in this description, watch out so you don't get burned out.
I think LilyPond is an amazing project from a sociological point of view, for several reasons:
- It has survived the transition from being a one man show (well two man show), when Han-Wen and Jan spent over 10 years of hacking day and night with about one new patch release once a week, to a team driven project where both Han-Wen and Jan basically have stepped back since they don't have much time left for the project, and other people have taken over the main hacking activities.
- Graham's organization of the GDP project, where he got a large number of people involved in writing and improving the documentation. Especially in the open source community, the documentation is often the weakest point and if it's done well it's often done by a single person.
- ...I think that in some time, Graham will get a more humble attitude towards the outcome of the GDP and realize that no single pedagogical model can solve all problems and answer all questions. Myself, I have in some sense been at the other end of the scale, spending far too much time on answering questions on the mailing list trying to adapt the answer to the expected level of knowledge of the person asking the question, when I probably would have spent much of the time in a better way if I had contributed more to the documentation to avoid getting many of the questions.
/Mats David Kastrup wrote:
Aaron Andrew Hunt <address@hidden> writes:On May 11, 2009, at 2:24 PM, address@hidden wrote:Dewdman, It might help to read this: http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Essays/smart-questions.htmlVery interesting link! It might as well be called "In Defense of Being a Complete A-Hole" No, programmers / hackers are smart folks and they are not customer service representatives, but many of them could really stand to be more ... like, uh, "normal" people, you know ... polite?People like you seem to confuse the concept of "polite" with "servant". Add to that the rather open insinuation that programmers are inferior beings that should be naturally serving their "normal" superiors, and you are placing yourself in a position where hypocrisy is the overwhelming message. Anyway, your rephrase is not to the point. If you insist on being rude and off-putting (namely a "Complete A-Hole"), you could at least reflect the essence by paraphrasing this "How to address Complete A-Holes if you intend to make them do work for you".
-- ============================================= Mats Bengtsson Signal Processing School of Electrical Engineering Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) SE-100 44 STOCKHOLM Sweden Phone: (+46) 8 790 8463 Fax: (+46) 8 790 7260 Email: address@hidden WWW: http://www.s3.kth.se/~mabe =============================================
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