Re: misleading use of d-d-a (was Re: Position Statement to the Dunc-Tanc "experiment")

[Florian Hinzmann <fh@debian.org>]

Good evening!


Sorry for contributing to a side thread this late. This mail slept in my 
drafts folder for several day. Only today I find the time to finish and send it.


On Thu, 26 Oct 2006 21:36:31 +0100
MJ Ray <mjr@phonecoop.coop> wrote:

> > I think it's uncool to be sending emails to d-d-a with "position statement"
> > in the subject that aren't indicative of a position statement of the
> > project.
> 
> The signatories are clearly named.  It is their position and whatever 
> the position of the project is has little to do with it.

Yes, the signatories were named. But I think the mail made it easy to
misinterpret it while reading it. The first paragraphs started with:

> After a long and ambivalent discussion during the last weeks the project
> "Dunc Tank" (short DT from now on) has recently started.  We consider
> [...]

> While we disagree with DT for the reasons outlined below, we want to
> [...]

> With this mail we would like to summarize our thoughts about the DT

The mail started stating some opinions referring to the
group having this opinions with "we". While I would consider this
ambiguous anyway I think it es particular unfortunate on
debian-devel-announce.

I did wonder who that "we" might be and scrolled to the bottom after
the second or third "we", then continued reading. Some others might
have stopped reading after some percentage of the mail and might still
have a wrong impression.


Trying to sum this up: This was far from being an abuse of d-d-a. But
the mail could have been much clearer with little effort. I would 
beg anyone to consider this when writing position statements which might
be controversial.


  Regards
      Florian


-- 
  Florian Hinzmann                         private: f.hinzmann@hamburg.de
                                            Debian: fh@debian.org
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