I agree that there are definitely communication challenges. In my part of the organization, I feel like we've tried very hard to answer any questions. Sometimes we get dinged for not explaining ourselves when we did make a public announcement of a forthcoming change, but it's on the OTW blog (which we use because it's generally considered rude to come into another community's space and say "hey, let us talk about our thing instead"). It's totally reasonable not to follow the OTW blog! And I think there's more we can do to talk about our decisions.
But why that is, is another matter entirely. And I think people are conflating communication issues (which, in particular, not being on the Board or in a communications position, Naomi couldn't have done much about, at least not without even more accusations of wanting to control everything) with technical issues. There are very few volunteers with the technical skills we need; Naomi has helped train many of the ones we have; it's awesome that skud now says she'd like the easy ability to do a bug or two and I hope we build out that capacity so that she and anyone else can do so; and the person I have confidence in to lead the building of those tools is Naomi. (Two side notes: (1) If I haven't said it on this thread, it's notable that she was able to hand over Vividcon successfully when it was mature. (2) Essentially all open source has an 80-20 model, at best, where 20% of the people do 80% of the work, so expecting a "successful" open source project to have a flat contribution curve is planning for failure.) On the other hand, without her, we just have to hope that someone else will actually build those structures. elz has had some things to say recently on related topics. From where I sit, there's a lot of second-hand criticism, very little based on what Naomi is actually doing with the volunteers she herself works with.
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branchandroot
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Date: 2011-11-16 04:57 pm (UTC)But why that is, is another matter entirely. And I think people are conflating communication issues (which, in particular, not being on the Board or in a communications position, Naomi couldn't have done much about, at least not without even more accusations of wanting to control everything) with technical issues. There are very few volunteers with the technical skills we need; Naomi has helped train many of the ones we have; it's awesome that skud now says she'd like the easy ability to do a bug or two and I hope we build out that capacity so that she and anyone else can do so; and the person I have confidence in to lead the building of those tools is Naomi. (Two side notes: (1) If I haven't said it on this thread, it's notable that she was able to hand over Vividcon successfully when it was mature. (2) Essentially all open source has an 80-20 model, at best, where 20% of the people do 80% of the work, so expecting a "successful" open source project to have a flat contribution curve is planning for failure.) On the other hand, without her, we just have to hope that someone else will actually build those structures. elz has had some things to say recently on related topics. From where I sit, there's a lot of second-hand criticism, very little based on what Naomi is actually doing with the volunteers she herself works with.