On Fri, Dec 19, 2008 at 9:10 PM, Dimi Paun <dimi@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > So what do we get for asking that we see this changed? > - snide remarks In this thread..ive seen snide comments from multiple parties on both sides. I've seen a round in the cycle of existing hostilities. There are no saints here, we are all sinners. Keeping score of the assumed intent of the multitude of emotional comments on one side or the other is futile and serves no useful purpose. If you are keeping score of snide comments, then you've already given up on a constructive discussion. You have to be able to give everyone the benefit of the doubt as to intent. The medium of email is excruciatingly poor at communicating irrational emotive discourse. The subtle nuances of body language, or vocal and facial ques which regulate the flow of face to face conversations are not there to help us read intent with any accuracy whatsoever. > - we are ask to produce numbers nobody can produce In this thread, I have not seen the decision makers ask that numbers be produced. I see numbers being produced by people to sustain their own arguments and getting upset that other are critical of the numbers. The numbers are a false premise, they shouldn't be debated, they should be summarily ignored. To debate them gives credibility to the idea that accurate numbers are going to impact the design, and no one has come forward and promised that in this thread.. > - we are sent on wild goose chances "upstream" when this > is a packages maintained by RH. Yes this has happened in this thread. I have in fact done this myself before and I still stand by it. If this change is going to be made is going to be made as part of an upstream discussion around the design goals of the default GNOME experience, a discussion broader in scope than this one change. I think the proponents of change do a disservice to their chosen cause in choosing the argumentation they have so far. Trying to coerce a change by hammering away with the blunt instruments of populism. It's not going to work. Coercion is the wrong method and populist arguments are the wrong tool. You have to persuade the decision-makers, and to do that you have to understand how they prioritize and think. The art of persuasion is a subtle science. It's brain surgery, not to be performed with the hammer or rhetoric or with the pitchforks and torches of populist appeal. You have to crawl inside the heads of the people whose minds you are looking to change, and think like them. > But hey, these things happen, we can work around them. What's not cool > is the attitude that it's OK to diss the users. That just sucks the > fun out of being part of Fedora. I think you are reading way to much into the responses of a a very long and very heated discussion which this thread is but one chapter. The exact same sort of thing could be said about it being uncool to diss developers. There have certainty been posts in this thread which could be read as dissing developers. I think we can all agree that its uncool to diss people generally. I'll go further and say that most people are going to screw up and when things get heated are going to choose words poorly and end up writing something that is laced with too much emotion and will be interpreted as a personal slight or attack. The real trick is figuring out how to make it possible to keep those mistakes from invoking another round of emotional responses in a self-perpetuating cycle of over-reaction. -jef -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
