[theforum] planet evolt

Martin Burns martin at easyweb.co.uk
Tue Sep 12 09:56:19 CDT 2006


On Tue, 12 Sep 2006 09:55:45 -0400, Matt Warden wrote:
> On 9/12/06, William Anderson wrote:
>> No-one has even bothered to say we should have some sort of discussion,
>> virtual meeting, physical meeting, whatever to actually talk about some
> of
>> this stuff.  IRC?  Skype?  measured discussion on theforum?  It's all
> just
>> do, do, do and no thought, which still scares the hell out of me.

> Why
> doesn't one of the people who feels our process is flawed start
> collecting what would be "right" in a document or something... 

Well, yes. I do seem to recall a time when this work started, but it
was pretty much killed at birth...

But if you (or anyone else who has problems with this) are volunteering,
go right ahead. But I'll tell you this - if the outline looks dramatically
different from
1) Someone proposes something
2) Enough discussion takes place to ensure that most people are OK about it,
   can live with it and no-one's going to block it (NB this is not congruent 
   with the current voting system)
3) Those behind it implement, or get enough other people to implement, or
   shut up about it already (because it's obvious that you've not got the
   support you thought you had)
then it's unlikely to get anywhere.

Incidentally, a wise way of getting through this even faster is to do the
discussion informally *before* coming out and making a proposal publically
that forces people to take a position. Work out who's going to have a
strong opinions, who's going to be affected, and talk to them informally.
Help them understand, allay their concerns, take their advice, improve 
your proposal and get them onboard early.

That way, your proposal will be better (or killed if it's really not going to
go anywhere), you look smarter for it, and you're ahead of the game in the 
discussion bit because you've already got people who agree with you.


> You can try to set up an IRC meeting if you'd like. We used to do that
> regularly when there was a small group of admins in North America

Sorry to be the memory gnome here, but those meetings had a more than
North America attendee list, just as Admin was multi-continental from
the start. Ad-hoc discussions are different of course, and will tend
to follow timezones, but when we formally invited admins to meetings,
we ensured that *everyone* could be involved at relatively sensible 
times.

Cheers
Martin
(who has daily conf calls involving Asia (India to China), Americas 
& Europe, so has no illusions about the size of the task)

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