[Theforum] confusion

Martin Burns martin at easyweb.co.uk
Sat Jun 8 10:03:47 CDT 2002


On Saturday, June 8, 2002, at 03:23  pm, rudy wrote:

> i've been sort of sitting on the sidelines for a while, hoping the
> confusion and running around in circles would abate as the various
> groups
> organized themselves and started doing the specialized tasks that they
> were
> created to handle
>
> instead, there is the same old floundering, and what's worse, it's now
> being cross-posted left and right between groups!!

On matters which concern those groups, yes.

> what i see is an ever smaller number of people keen to make a
> contribution,
> and TOTAL CONFUSION about how they can help
>
> why? because there's nobody in charge

I believe reps for groups are finalised now. Steering Committee can
start as of next week I think.

> we are now fully one month past dan's departure, and what do we have?
> discussion about how long to keep open a voting process to nominate
> leaders
> for the groups

I think said discussion took about 3 posts in any group which discussed
it and it didn't divert attention from any other tasks at hand. Please
do not misrepresent this.

> i registered myself for two or three groups (i'm not sure, and that's
> symptomatic) -- marketing, content, and whatever group thesite
> metamorphosizes itself into

Can't speak for thesite, but the other two seem to be getting on with
stuff.

> martin, why don't you just take over and be the leader?  you seem to be
> itching for it,

Sorry, Rudy, that's a 180 degree misunderstanding on your part.

The point is, Rudy, this organisation has made a decision that it is to
be an open, democratic one, not a dictatorship by either one person or a
small group.

We are *not* going back to the "Admin is a self-appointed group that
runs everything the way it wants and everyone else is a peasant at the
gates" scenario unless the organisation decides to do so. Which proposal
I will happily oppose.

> and it would give you the opportunity to
> show everybody how things should be done the right way, rather than
> pointing out when they fall short of best practices

Rudy, if I started demanding that the db schema were done a certain way
and it were utter crap, you'd be saying "no, that's not how it's going
to happen"

If we're putting together requirements and assessment criteria for hosts
which don't actually say what our requirements and criteria are, then as
someone who puts together requirements for a living, I'm also going to
wave flags and point out that that's not going to get us anywhere. In
fact, they were less useful and detailed than the draft categories I
published on the 20th of May. Filling in those categories should have
taken less than a day. If any needed changing, then that should have
taken all of a couple of hours.

I don't have the knowledge that members of the sysadmin group to define
what our desired answers should be, but I'm very clear on what the
question should look like. It should look a hell of a lot better than
"um, y'know, it'd be nice if we had some space, somewhere." I know that
there are members of the sysadmin group who *do* know what a
requirements document should look like.

Martin
_______________________________________________
email: martin at easyweb.co.uk             PGP ID:	0xA835CCCB
	martin at members.evolt.org      snailmail:	30 Shandon Place
   tel:	+44 (0)774 063 9985				Edinburgh,
   url:	http://www.easyweb.co.uk			Scotland




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