Dissent and multiple viewpoints
Hi,
Have we really forgotten what it is like to jointly work on
something when every one is not a rah-erah cheerleader? Where we can
have people contributing who, not being fully convinced, provide the
loyal opposition viewpoint, without being dismissively labelled as
whiners?
In a large project it is easy to carve off small groups of
very like minded people, and doing so might even be nicer, since
there is no differences of opinion; but then we have strong
differences emerge between largely unrelated groups of people who are
well along doing things at odds with each other.
I think the ability to pull together on something even when
one is mildly skeptical of the outcome would be invaluable to the
strong proponents, since these skeptics provide an alternate
viewpoint and also help provide a modicum of check and balance to
irrational exuberance that might otherwise result.
If something that is supposed to be as inclusive as the social
committee can not deal with people who are also committed to the
experiment, but are voiving cautinary notes, then I am afraid I don't
see how they can come up with something widely accepted by an
increasingly diverse social body at large.
Dismissing co-operative people as whiners and and
obstructionists if their views are not absolutely in line with the
proponents loses the projects which display such characteristics of
potentially useful contributions.
However, if the social committe types are only looking for
dutiful, "yes whatever you say, boss" kinda commentary, I guess I'm
outa here.
manoj
--
'Ooohh.. "FreeBSD is faster over loopback, when compared to Linux over
the wire". Film at 11.' -- Linus Torvalds
Manoj Srivastava <srivasta@debian.org> <http://www.debian.org/~srivasta/>
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