[Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a BadIdea, part 2

[Samuel Klein]

Gregory Maxwell writes:
>> Imagine that someone cleaning your office took your important
>> paperwork and dumped it in a bin.  You complain— "Hey we need that
>> stuff to be accessible!" and they retort  "Thank you for your
>> _feedback_. We'll consider it during our future cleaning plans".
>>
>> We're not just providing feedback here. We're collectively making a
>> decision, as we've always done, thank you very much.

Well put.

It's great to see new things being tried.
It seems to me this sort of change (any big change) might work out
more smoothly if the final implementation of any major change was
separated from its development.  That implementation can be handled by
people who have long experience specifically with collective
decisions, rolling out changes, identifying and isolating
controversial bits, &c.

We're not bad at that within community discussions -- and the
"line-item rollback" ability for people to simply undo specific
changes that irk them makes this much, much easier to manage.

Any time a central process becomes a bottleneck to "considering
feedback" it becomes harder to swiftly reach a harmonious conclusion.


On Sat, Jun 5, 2010 at 5:20 PM, Mark Williamson <node.ue at gmail.com> wrote:
> I am convinced that the unique organizational structure of our
> organization, in which the community has historically been given a
> very high level of authority in the decision-making process, is one of
> the key elements of our success.

Almost certainly.

> Have we entered a new chapter in our history as
> a community in which we, the people who have helped build this
> project, no longer get to help make the important decisions by
> contributing our ideas and venting our frustrations?

Absolutely not.

SJ


PS - as one more data point on the interlang links specifically:  I
also use the rollover text of interlanguage links for translation -
even when I have other good translation resources handy.  That is one
of our great accomplishments, and we should make more noise about it,
not less.  :-)