Re: Communication channels: Please raise your opinion
On Thu, Aug 25, 2011 at 09:33:36AM +0900, Charles Plessy wrote:
> I a quite clumsy with IRC and in a distant timezone, so please go ahead without
> me for meetings.
Seems like Thorsten and me might be alone ... but I try to lurk on IRC
and we'll see who might join.
> It is nice to have a Debian Med blog (with the name of the poster, I think that
> is uncontroversial). I can understand that some readers of Planet Debian did
> not like Steffen's post about shopping at Amazon, but still I found it
> interseting, because the message is not only an invitation to buy, but also
> simply that Steffen is exploring how to channel unavoidable expences (daily
> products) in a way that brings money to Debian.
To say shortly in public what I wrote Steffen in private: I asked him
for a *heavy* rewrite or to kill the article at all.
I agree that a report about using Amazon infrastructure for free for
computational biology is an interesting topic and perfectly worth a blog
posting. There is no question that a "thank you for this" is apropriate
if we get support for the goal we are targetting as a team.
However the topic became blatantly spoiled by the obvious attempt to
drag other people into Amazon customer chartering which is TOTALLY
(sorry for shouting) unacceptable on behalf of the Debian Med team. We
simply can not advertise some specific company be it Amazon or somebody
else and I have a very strong opinion about the links to Amazon that
remained on the Blog page: They need to vanish as soon as possible.
> Personally, I think that apologises and correction for future posts were
> enough.
I perfectly accept the apology, but the part "correction" is IMHO only
half done (remaining Amazon links). An exclusive(!) report about using
the Amazon infrastructure would be fine for me. But this report should
eyplain in detail how to log in, some measures of calculation speed,
whatever.
> “We will not hide problems” is our social contract, so I find that
> removing the blog entry from Planet Debian is a bit out of proportion. I have
> seen people advertising their company or, like this morning, publishing some
> comparative buying guides that are much less related to Debian.
Well, *people* are free to blog whatever they want if they want to carry
the risk of beeing regarded as spammer. We can not prevent this.
However we have to deal with an anonymous posting on behalf of a team
which is unacceptable.
> Also, I think that posts about
> bioinformatics would be appropriate for Debian Planet, as long as they are
> related to Debian Med as a team.
I would see this in a very wide sense: Anything which is somehow
related to Free Software in our field - even very specific articles
touching this area are fine.
> Lastly, (about the blog), I think that discussions about the Amazon cloud are
> appropriate.
Definitely.
> Steffen received from Amazon some free hours of use for the
> purpose of doing Debian development there, and I think that is very similar to
> hardware gifts that Debian recieves. I think that it was good to thank Amazon
> in front of the Debian community.
Thanks to those who deserve it.
> There would be a clear misbehaviour and
> conflict of interest if for instance we would regularly mention Amazon or any
> company in the hope of obaining more sponsorship from them, but this is not
> what we are doing.
IMHO we are doing this currently on our blog by linking to Amazon.
> Back to the other topics, I will briefly mention that I am not very interested
> in the current microblogging platforms. Sorry to be negative, but I do not get
> used to the arbitrary limitation of 140 characters and the URL obsfucation.
I'm personally sharing this opinion. However, I came to the conclusion
that complete ignorance of this stuff might stop us from reaching out to
more users and thus I try to force myself to some extend into this.
> In conclusion, what made people nervous on one hand, and what we need on the
> other hand is money. I am often thinking on how I could integrate some Debian
> development in a research grant, but this is not easy given that my research
> projects are more centered about making technological developments in molecular
> biology, and that in my career I am still at a stage where I can hardly propose
> a project hiring more than one person with good chances of being accepted. But
> let's keep this in mind (for instance, Japans's JSPS Advanced Research Networks
> call http://www.jsps.go.jp/english/e-c2c/). In general, I think that we should
> favor ways to get money that is managed by institutions, be it SPI or our
> research centers.
Our strong connection to Debian helps us getting some money. However,
the last sprint has shown that a bit more will not harm. I'm not
sure about the numbers but I do not think that some of our activists
should pay more than for his own expenses (if at all).
> Perhaps the most ambitious way to channel money into Debian Med would be to
> sell it as a shelf product or as a book describing how to use it. That would
> be a big project, but that may help research labs to contribute by buying
> the product.
I would really love it if somebody would do this. I'd volunteer to
write 2-3 chapters of a book - but I'm not totally convinced that this
would sell that much to get more than one sprint done.
> It would also cut some trees, but that is another story ;)
Trees are cut for much worse things ... :-)
Kind regards
Andreas.
--
http://fam-tille.de
Reply to: