On Mon, Aug 15, 2005 at 12:36:40PM +0600, || स्वक्ष || svaksha wrote: > Each and every one of us has a *real life* outside of FLOSS and other > volunteerism and the only common thread stringing us together is the > philosophical ideology, good work and interest in FSF/GNU. I don't believe this is true. While each of us certainly does bring to the table our own local cultural background, and as a result Debian is far from having any sort of monoculture, there *is* a shared "work culture" in Debian with unique features of its own. Some of its features include: - You don't Cc: people on mailing list replies unless they request it. - You don't mess with another maintainer's package without letting them know first what's going one. - You have no right to make demands of how other people spend their time. - You have no right to block someone else from fixing an issue you have chosen not to work on (provided that there is agreement that it's an issue and that it can be fixed, that is). - It is impolite to disappear for long periods of time without letting the project know you will be gone. There are also some cultural artifacts present in Debian which not everyone agrees are a good idea and at least some people are hoping to change, such as: - When you disagree with a decision and the people who made it don't actually want your opinion, declare that a Cabal is responsible. - When someone in a position of responsibility juggles multiple tasks and fails to handle one of these tasks as quickly as you want them to, loudly insist that this, too, is a sign of a cabal. - Flaming and ridiculing people on mailing lists is a greater good than advancing technical discussions. Now, there are plenty of other traits which I identify with Debian culture as *I* experience it, but it's hard for me, with the perspective of only a single person, to draw a line between bits that are part of a globally shared Debian culture and those that are the result of my own projections and of a culture that I externally share with those I interact with regularly.[1] Nevertheless, the fact is that Debian has more than a decade of history as a community, and it's more than a little arrogant for any newcomer to this community to expect that Debian is going to meet their personal culture halfway. Heck, I'm sure that even I waited until about 6 months after becoming a DD before I started to try to coerce others into changing their behavior... > Besides that, choosing to participate in a particular community is > mostly a free choice, cutting across cultural, language and national > barriers. This basic fact must be respected at all times. > IMHO, expecting people from other different cultures to change their > behaviour/culture, etc... to conform to ones own expectations or > behavioural patterns is a highly inflexible attitude. An important factor in successfully getting along in a multicultural project like Debian is to make an effort to recognize *others'* cultural expectations, and avoid deliberately offending your interlocutor. It's a lot easier to consciously modify how one expresses oneself than it is to modify one's culturally ingrained reaction to an offense given, and by cultural standards that Erinn and I share (I'll let someone else figure out if this is a shared *Debian* culture, or a shared *American* culture), what Clytie did was *very* rude. Not because she didn't approach the issue head-on (that would just make her ineffective), but because she made disparaging comments about this group publically to others *instead* of approaching it head-on. Regardless of the terms Erinn may have used to describe this behavior, if people aren't able to acknowledge that offense was given here (intentionally or not), I hardly think they're in a position to criticize others for having inflexible attitudes about culture. And BTW, of all cultures I have ever encountered, the one invariant that appears to transcend them all is that they are *all* xenophobic on some level. It's only *learning* that bridges the gap between cultures; cultures themselves are useless for this. Something to think about before trumpeting the virtues of unconditional respect for cultures... -- Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world. vorlon@debian.org http://www.debian.org/ [1] Right, so um, cue Biella or something. ;)
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