Re: [gentoo-dev] Tone in Gentoo

[Jeroen Roovers]

On Thu, 17 Jun 2010 00:14:28 +0200
Sebastian Pipping <sping@g.o> wrote:

> On 06/16/10 07:43, Jeroen Roovers wrote:
> > That's a conclusion first, then a premise?
>
> "Tone is not a strength of Gentoo" is my own obserservation.
> Please be more verbose - I fail to understand the core of your
> question.

I was responding two the two previous (quoted) paragraphs:


1> Tone is currently not a strength of Gentoo.

2> As I have heard there are people not joining Gentoo because the
2> atmosphere in Gentoo is lacking respect and empathy.

and the question was whether "the atmosphere in Gentoo is lacking
respect and empathy"(2) equals "bad tone"(1), whereby the latter
paragraph(the premise) serves to prove the former (the conclusion). In
my humble opinion, a lack of respect or a lack of empathy is not the
same as "bad tone". Whereby I take "bad tone" to mean is communicating
in a bad, possibly malicious way, like condescending or scathing in
nature. I guess bad communication could result from a lack of respect,
but that presupposes a history between the parties that do not show
each other respect.

A lack of empathy is something that really does bite us, as is already
explained by Roy, with his three cause of cumulative misunderstanding.
There's a language barrier, English is *not* the easiest language to
bring an unmistakable point across in, and on top of that there is a
problem, between people from different nations, of different sexes and
of different ages.

I'd say there is yet a fourth cause, which is that the Internet (that
thing appearing on your computer screen) offers far fewer moral
handholds than your typical brick-and-mortar environment with real
people in them.

> I have oberved this in #gentoo, in the forums and basically every
> thread releated to Python 3 - that topic seams to be a heat bomb.
> Are links to concrete threads really necessary?  I'm afraid we'll be
> arguing about that very case and justifications for this and that
> sentence then.  My concern are all threads together.

That's not much of an example.

> I agree with antarus that it shouldn't be the job of just DevRel to
> demand friendly tone on communication mediums but the job of everyone
> involved.

Well, on top of that, devrel already tried that once, and I think it
didn't work.

> As I understand you say that bad bug reports make it hard for you to
> stay friendly.  Correct?

No, it is difficult to write a good response to any bug report. If you
need to write a response at all, the report is probably so bad it needs
to be closed (perhaps to be reopened later). A bad bug report takes more
time to wrangle than a good one, so the more bad bug reports, the
longer you need to wrangle them and the less time you have to
elaborate, inform, help or thank the reporters. Bad bug reports do make
me hesitantly find ways to say more with less, which some reporters
might find rude. It still isn't very obvious to me when I might behave
badly in someone else's view, but I do respond to such concerns when
they are raised (and take even more time to either defend my view or to
change the Summary around or to request more specific information or
output pertaining to a changed description).

> Any ideas what we could do on our end to improve the situation?

Well, apart from explaining technical stuff[1] as in the example above,
we could obviously explain how our developers work, how much most of
them get payed for doing that, inform users of our services what they
can and cannot expect to get.


     jer


[1] We have a couple of pretty good guides[2][3] about using
bugzilla.g.o, but I suspect bug reporters who report badly tend to be
the same people who skip a three page lecture on how to report bugs.

[2] <http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/bugzilla-howto.xml> the official
    thing, as referred to on <https://bugzilla.gentoo.org/>.
[3] <http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/qa/bug-wranglers/index.xml> the
    guide for bug-wranglers slash project page.