[Koha-devel] Vote NOW for the Koha Community Website Theme

[MJ Ray]

"Joshua Ferraro" <jmf at liblime.com> wrote:
> On Tue, May 13, 2008 at 11:25 AM, MJ Ray <mjr at phonecoop.coop> wrote:
> >  To be clear, I don't mean anyone posted the above as deception, but it
> >  is now chock-full of false statements that koha.org is making.
> 
> MJ, I find these kinds of posts by you to be infuriating. You seem to be
> bent on hostility as a primary way of discussion.

I find personal messages sent to the mailing list and being ignored by
kados on IRC infuriating... I seem to be cut out of whatever
discussion is going on about the website.  I'm here, ready to work,
but excluded.  I don't know whether any changes I submit to
www.koha.org are just going to be fed to the village goat.  Why is it
surprising that I am getting increasingly hostile about this
situation?

> The statements made on koha.org are not false.

How?  Some of them clearly are false now, such as "The Grand Prize
winner and and Honorable Mentions will be announced on March 19, 2008"
and we should amend those statements because they are now making us
look untrustworthy and poor timekeepers.

[...]
> Could the process have been done more democratically? Undoubtably,
> yes. But remember that if the contests came back and everyone was
> totally thrilled with one or more of the designs, it's unlikely this issue
> would even have been raised by anyone but you.

I don't feel that's surprising when someone who does raise this sort
of issue is subject to this type of unfair personal attack.

> Also, please remember, koha.org is a domain name that is owned (it
> was purchased in fact) by LibLime.

If LibLime wants, I'm happy to ask TTLLP to pay for koha.org in future
and/or transfer it to an open community-controlled organisation, to
stop that being a problem.

[...]
> why do you nit pick us (LibLime) for wanting to deploy koha.org on
> plone?

That looks like selective memory.  I've no complaint with wanting to
deploy on plone.  As I wrote when it was announced: "I'm not bothered
either way about Plone.  It has benefits, such as the version control
and FTP possibility; and it has drawbacks, such as having to jump
through hoops to avoid breaking our existing URLs and our difficulty
in supporting python and particularly Zope as well as perl and
Apache."

If anything, I'm nit-picking the lack of information and the poor
change management.

> Our only aim with this move has been to improve and promote the
> Koha community through transparent community participation in the
> maintenance of the website, translation of the website, improved and
> up-to-date documentation.

Well, as far as I can tell, moving to Plone (a technical measure) will
not necessarily affect transparency of community participation (a
social problem), may or may not improve translation (I'm not clear
what the problem is with that) and is now blocking documentation
updates, according to Nicole Engard on this list on 2008-05-02.

> If I recall correctly MJ, you own a Koha website; [...]

No.  It was retired in favour of www.koha.org when that was last
upgraded, remember?  This is partly why the decline of www.koha.org
concerns me so much.  My own sites only have a few pages on Koha and I
have a scratchpad where I upload patches first, partly so TTLLP and
associates can get them easily.  Crippling www.koha.org hurts my work.

> >  Is it OK if I remove the false statements and request republication?
> No, because you are implying that your opinion constitutes the
> official koha.org position, and the maintainers of the koha.org's
> decisions about how best to maintain it do not;

I don't understand that.  I can't put anything on www.koha.org without
its maintainers approving it.  All I can do is request republication.

> in fact, as I've pointed
> out before, there is not and never has been an official process for
> determining the community's position on any given decision

-- and I pointed out that we have used a couple of ways to determine
the community's position in the past, so why are we inventing yet
another?  This is a problem other communities have answered, too.

> [...] I'd also like to
> see this list be moderated with some rules of conduct, addressing
> rudeness and general posting guidelines.

Me too.  As with other groups where I've helped to develop codes of
conduct, I'd definitely include forbidding these sort of personal
attacks from the list!

> [...] I am offended by your tone and I think you are hurting the
> community's morale, and causing stagnation and indecision.

Tone is notoriously absent from emails.  Anyone can pick up the phone
if they want.  My number is in my footer (or I can give a SIP URL
off-list), and I'll go switch off voicemail for a bit now.

In my opinion, the biggest challenge to our community's morale and
cause of stagnation is our current apparent inability to approach a
release.

Hope that explains,
-- 
MJ Ray (slef)
Webmaster for hire, statistician and online shop builder for a small
worker cooperative http://www.ttllp.co.uk/ http://mjr.towers.org.uk/
(Notice http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html) tel:+44-844-4437-237