[Foundation-l] Community, collaboration, and cognitive biases

[Michael Snow]

On 6/9/2010 2:01 AM, Austin Hair wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 9, 2010 at 12:55 AM, Aryeh Gregor
> <Simetrical+wikilist at gmail.com>  wrote:
>    
>> 2) Make sure that every paid developer spends time dealing with the
>> community.  This can include giving support to end users, discussing
>> things with volunteers, reviewing patches, etc.  They should be doing
>> this on paid time, and they should be discussing their personal
>> opinions without consulting with anyone else (i.e., not summarizing
>> official positions).  Paid developers and volunteers have to get to
>> know each other and have to be able to discuss MediaWiki together.
>>      
> I like the "discussing their personal opinions without consulting with
> anyone else" bit, and you bring up a very good point.
>
> I don't think (and I don't mean to imply that anyone else does) that
> anyone's conspiring to keep the community out, or saying "leave this
> to the professionals, we know better."  When you're hired onto a team,
> though, you're wary of saying anything that would cause strife or
> confusion.  This isn't necessarily out of fear of retribution from
> your employer—it's simply conventional professional ethics, and it's
> usually not even a conscious thing.  (It's also not limited to paid
> staff—the people we put on the Board specifically for their vocal
> opinions on things often fall into this, for understandable reasons.)
>    
When it comes to the board, along with others who have oversight 
responsibilities like management staff, there's an additional factor in 
this. It's not generally appropriate, or good for staff morale, to 
publicly go through the work of employees or contractors when you're in 
such a position. There are good reasons that work evaluations and other 
personnel matters are considered confidential. I don't mean to say that 
staff shouldn't be discussing code, roadmaps, or rationales as widely 
and openly as possible, but if for example I was qualified to review a 
staff member's patch (which I'm not), I might want to think twice about 
what audience gets that feedback.

--Michael Snow