I write you this from the far, far border of the perl community, being just a hobbist, a lover of the language and of the community, a mere CPAN author and not a professional one, but during nearly two decades I have lernt to love both the laguage (my only programming one) and the community.
We are discussing about events of recents weeks (weeks for the majority of us, years probably for you) also at perlmonks.org (PS: where I lurk as Discipulus) and there I fistly put my contribution and, even if changed my perception of what happened, asking here and there, reading here and there, my basic argument is mostly unchanged.
You make a big call for a new, different governance and I'm toattally with you on this point.
Then you highlight that the pandemic made a real problems even worst and provoked even harder reactions. This is sure and reveals another, sad, fact: the frustration we all have, tends to be directed toward our neareast neighbours, as always. This involve another aspect: personalism.
I understood there were and are many techinical true facts at the begin of the division, both parts judging their solution as the only one able to save Perl. It is always like this: rarely people start hating others with no reasons (I dont say this is the case of hate anyway) but suddenly the dispute leaves the frame of a sane interaction and decays into personalism. No more idea A and idea B, but individual #1 and individual #2.
Personalism is a vicious habit of the human being; a social and feral beast. All of us, in different degree we suffer from this.
Beacuse of this in my post I speak of a new ethic. But as you can easily understand, ethic cannot be imposed. Your "listening with kindness" is very near to what I'd call ethic, as it is your, holy words!, mention to "attention for our contributors' mental health" well said! We are a community and we are not in the position to burn out our best brains. We need to treat them with the highest care possible, as we should be tolerant for different style of speaking, obviously not allowing mere insults. And also no one must feel hurted.
About this last point I must confess I really feel uncomfortable. I mean: the politically correct always makes me uncomfortable. It is perceived very differently between different european countries and much more in confront of USA. I dont want to say someone has the rigth to harass or insult someone, nor making discriminatory assertions, but when there are real arguments even rougly expressed, we should warn the form but accept the content.
Historically bans and prohibitions are implemented by fragile powers, near to their death. They are a sign of obscurantism not of enlightenment.
By other hand be able and humble to make some, many steps, back is a sign of wisdom. And we need it a lot.
Where I dissent with you is about leadership. You made the Larry example. This is a rare happening: the illuminated prince, the charismatic leader. Not only is rare but is also risky. I bow in front of him to have been able to retire before becoming a problem. It always happens. Exceptions can be count on one hand fingers.
Now I have to quote a bounch of paragraphs of my perlmonk's post, hoping in bigger audience:
too much freedom?
I hate rules. I have enough hubris to say: I'm a good fellow even without rules. But I also know, and this time from my experience, that freedom not alwayas attracts our nicer, best part. While in internet everything is also falsed by a layer of "let's pretend", mimicry, conscious or not. It is part of the game. As under the alchol effect, while chatting or intercting in internet we have less inibitions. Sometimes this is a good thing, but rarely.
At $work we dont act this way. Why? Because we, conscious or not, we live in fear and we are assimilitated the sneaky, stinking thing called gerarchy. At $work the present perl situation, happening, it would be impossible. Someone would be fired before, by far before such situation can even happen.
We like freedom? Or we want to sell perl to some company, just to interact correclty?
Freedom is hard work. Like laziness. Freedom has its own rules and self rules. Freedom is based on ethic.
we need some help?
people in history already experienced these kind of problems. And we all know how best ideas converted to the worst systems on Earth: French revolution? Soviets? Did you need more examples? But there are some sparks of light in history, when people discussed how the power works and how it must be applied. Autogestion is hard to implement. Historically autogestion was ever fragile.
We are living at borders of a rare period: free software is still a great think, with some chance to survive. Do we really need to fall under the spectre of personalism? Are we able to manage a community?
We can learn from other organizations, not only in the IT world, who faced same perils. We also have professionists who can help us. Why cant we pay some socio/psycho doctor to follow our leader developping team? Serioulsy!
Are we in the position to burn out fresh and willing brains? I doubt it. We need to squeeze 120% of our manpower to evolve and survive. Do we need my copntribution? I doubt, but just in case: here I'm.
ethic
We all want this to be the last time something like this happens, dont we? As with relatives I always says: take the best it comes from them, simply ignore all the remaining. If not some rules, we need a frame of relations that must be saner than the present one. At the end we need a new ethic.
No one, at every level of contribuitions, must feel harassed or damaged anymore, please, no one.
We have a lovable language; are we able to build a lovable community?
(end of quote)
That said I look to all of you with the biggest respect possible. My chapeau for you, able and willing to do the work I'm not able or I have not the will to do.
But seriously, do you think you, we, can improvise the mutual interaction? Maybe we need to RTFM of autogestion.
I dont say it is easy, but is probably the last chance. I'm strongly for decisions made by who works on something but this must involve some look backward to the base, to the community. Let see what happened with Request Tracker of CPAN: if I understood it correctly, people working on it decided to close it, and this is among their rigths, but you cannot forget to ask to the community! How? I dont know: a survey among cpan authors? maybe difficult to do? Ok, but it must be done. Then if the community wants RT, the community must spit someone able to manage it.
We can survive many years more with some cruft in the code; can we survive to divisions, bans, balkanization? I fear no.
My best wishes to you all
L*
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Dear Leon, dear community,
I write you this from the far, far border of the perl community, being just a hobbist, a lover of the language and of the community, a mere CPAN author and not a professional one, but during nearly two decades I have lernt to love both the laguage (my only programming one) and the community.
We are discussing about events of recents weeks (weeks for the majority of us, years probably for you) also at perlmonks.org (PS: where I lurk as Discipulus) and there I fistly put my contribution and, even if changed my perception of what happened, asking here and there, reading here and there, my basic argument is mostly unchanged.
You make a big call for a new, different governance and I'm toattally with you on this point.
Then you highlight that the pandemic made a real problems even worst and provoked even harder reactions. This is sure and reveals another, sad, fact: the frustration we all have, tends to be directed toward our neareast neighbours, as always. This involve another aspect: personalism.
I understood there were and are many techinical true facts at the begin of the division, both parts judging their solution as the only one able to save Perl. It is always like this: rarely people start hating others with no reasons (I dont say this is the case of hate anyway) but suddenly the dispute leaves the frame of a sane interaction and decays into personalism. No more idea A and idea B, but individual #1 and individual #2.
Personalism is a vicious habit of the human being; a social and feral beast. All of us, in different degree we suffer from this.
Beacuse of this in my post I speak of a new ethic. But as you can easily understand, ethic cannot be imposed. Your "listening with kindness" is very near to what I'd call ethic, as it is your, holy words!, mention to "attention for our contributors' mental health" well said! We are a community and we are not in the position to burn out our best brains. We need to treat them with the highest care possible, as we should be tolerant for different style of speaking, obviously not allowing mere insults. And also no one must feel hurted.
About this last point I must confess I really feel uncomfortable. I mean: the politically correct always makes me uncomfortable. It is perceived very differently between different european countries and much more in confront of USA. I dont want to say someone has the rigth to harass or insult someone, nor making discriminatory assertions, but when there are real arguments even rougly expressed, we should warn the form but accept the content.
Historically bans and prohibitions are implemented by fragile powers, near to their death. They are a sign of obscurantism not of enlightenment.
By other hand be able and humble to make some, many steps, back is a sign of wisdom. And we need it a lot.
Where I dissent with you is about leadership. You made the Larry example. This is a rare happening: the illuminated prince, the charismatic leader. Not only is rare but is also risky. I bow in front of him to have been able to retire before becoming a problem. It always happens. Exceptions can be count on one hand fingers.
Now I have to quote a bounch of paragraphs of my perlmonk's post, hoping in bigger audience:
too much freedom?
I hate rules. I have enough hubris to say: I'm a good fellow even without rules. But I also know, and this time from my experience, that freedom not alwayas attracts our nicer, best part. While in internet everything is also falsed by a layer of "let's pretend", mimicry, conscious or not. It is part of the game. As under the alchol effect, while chatting or intercting in internet we have less inibitions. Sometimes this is a good thing, but rarely.
At $work we dont act this way. Why? Because we, conscious or not, we live in fear and we are assimilitated the sneaky, stinking thing called gerarchy. At $work the present perl situation, happening, it would be impossible. Someone would be fired before, by far before such situation can even happen.
We like freedom? Or we want to sell perl to some company, just to interact correclty?
Freedom is hard work. Like laziness. Freedom has its own rules and self rules. Freedom is based on ethic.
we need some help?
people in history already experienced these kind of problems. And we all know how best ideas converted to the worst systems on Earth: French revolution? Soviets? Did you need more examples? But there are some sparks of light in history, when people discussed how the power works and how it must be applied. Autogestion is hard to implement. Historically autogestion was ever fragile.
We are living at borders of a rare period: free software is still a great think, with some chance to survive. Do we really need to fall under the spectre of personalism? Are we able to manage a community?
We can learn from other organizations, not only in the IT world, who faced same perils. We also have professionists who can help us. Why cant we pay some socio/psycho doctor to follow our leader developping team? Serioulsy!
Are we in the position to burn out fresh and willing brains? I doubt it. We need to squeeze 120% of our manpower to evolve and survive. Do we need my copntribution? I doubt, but just in case: here I'm.
ethic
We all want this to be the last time something like this happens, dont we? As with relatives I always says: take the best it comes from them, simply ignore all the remaining. If not some rules, we need a frame of relations that must be saner than the present one. At the end we need a new ethic.
No one, at every level of contribuitions, must feel harassed or damaged anymore, please, no one.
We have a lovable language; are we able to build a lovable community?
(end of quote)
That said I look to all of you with the biggest respect possible. My chapeau for you, able and willing to do the work I'm not able or I have not the will to do.
But seriously, do you think you, we, can improvise the mutual interaction? Maybe we need to RTFM of autogestion.
I dont say it is easy, but is probably the last chance. I'm strongly for decisions made by who works on something but this must involve some look backward to the base, to the community. Let see what happened with Request Tracker of CPAN: if I understood it correctly, people working on it decided to close it, and this is among their rigths, but you cannot forget to ask to the community! How? I dont know: a survey among cpan authors? maybe difficult to do? Ok, but it must be done. Then if the community wants RT, the community must spit someone able to manage it.
We can survive many years more with some cruft in the code; can we survive to divisions, bans, balkanization? I fear no.
My best wishes to you all
L*