Lessons learned (was: Re: DPL candidates Q&A summaries)
On Monday 21 March 2005 17:28, Ean Schuessler wrote:
> On Monday 21 March 2005 8:10 am, David Schmitt wrote:
> > After making a final run through through the debian-vote archives I now
> > hope to have faithfully captured 2005s DPL candidates Q&A on
> >
> > http://debian.edv-bus.at/vote-2005/
> >
> > Thank you all for making Debian an OS worth spending ones time on such
> > things!
>
> David. A real bang-up job! You've raised the bar for Debian-Vote coverage.
>
> Thanks so much. I know its helped me sort things out in my head.
Next year I'll code up some scripts. Handling that with vim only was a major
fault on my side.
Perhaps I should write up a few bits I've learned in the last weeks:
* Automate everything. The current pages are all hand-crafted and changing the
layout slightly in mid-fly was very onerous. Also keeping the markers,
answers and the changelog in sync was error-prone and complex (I gave up on
the changelog after a few days as you might have noticed. The optimum would
be some script converting a bunch of lists.d.o URLs or a MBOX to the summary
pages.
* Objectivity is boring. Stating more than the obviously obvious is already
introducing bias, therefore I tried to restrict myself to a very small
vocabulary, almost only stating "$candidate answered:" and pasting most of
the mails in full. Even deleting short introductory paragraphs were often
"hard" decisions about how much they distort the mail.
* Summaries are incomplete by design. Complete coverage is already provided by
lists.d.o. The value of a summary is to provide entry points for research
into those areas of interest to the reader.
* Summarise immediately. This is probably my personal problem, but having a
email client which marks messages as read immediately makes it error-prone to
try to revisit a certain question, it might drown in the noise. In the end I
relied much on my browsers history of lists.d.o, reading the mails first via
IMAP and then summarising from l.d.o (which is needed anyways for the URLs).
And last but not least a few bits for debian-vote writers at large:
* Subjects should succintly state the content of your mail. "Question to all
candidates" might be true, but doesn't earn you points for style.
* Soapboxing. While there were - far between - interesting questions asking
for clarifications of answers, many threads sparked by answers primarily
statements of personal experience and/or opinion of lesser interest to the
community at large. The mailing list has 442 subscribers, consider whether
you couldn't reach a larger (and more interested[1]) audience by posting such
statements on your blog (or debianplanet (or ...)) with the added benefit of
making the life of the interested reader much easier?
* Archives. Some of the questions asked this time should probably be asked
ever candidate (e.g. [2] ;) perhaps we could come up with a set of "timeless"
questions which could be suggested as platform-base questions, leaving more
time for the "hot-topic" stuff when campaigning.
Regards, David
[1] I know, I'm generalising.
[2] http://debian.edv-bus.at/vote-2005/muppet-character.html
--
- hallo... wie gehts heute?
- *hust* gut *rotz* *keuch*
- gott sei dank kommunizieren wir über ein septisches medium ;)
-- Matthias Leeb, Uni f. angewandte Kunst, 2005-02-15
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