Jenn Vesperman wrote:
I guess the thing here is that while competition brings out the best in some people, it brings out the worst - or completely suppresses - others. I'm not saying 'stop doing things your way', I'm saying only 'ok, fine, so a competition based culture works for you - please don't assume it works for everyone'. If you already knew that .. then sure, we can discuss it further. If you didn't, now you know. Feel free to ask questions and try to explore the idea. :)
I agree with your comments, Jenn, and would add my own pet theory, which is this:
In an environment where the "innovate through competition" strategy has been used a great deal, the limits of success for that particular strategy will be reached, and some of it's limiting flaws exposed. A good example within debian would be the time wasted by flamewars.
In that situation, the use of different strategies (for example "innovate through cooperative effort"), may prove to be very successful, since they are not going to suffer from the same particular flaws as the dominating strategy, and they will explore areas of approach that have not already been used by previous attempts.
I'm not claiming that some strategies are necessarily better than others. But I do believe that using a variety of approaches is likely to succeed better than any single approach. Of course this is already going on within debian :) But I do think that the debian-women project is going to help debian as a whole to broaden its outlook and that debian as a whole will benefit from this.
Helen.