Stuart Jarvis

Jos has been getting very philosophical lately. One post that got me thinking about how odd KDE is (in a good way) was his one about working together.

KDE is quite unlike anywhere else I have worked, for fun or profit. Probably the closest analog is my involvement at university with the student newspaper, the Warwick Boar where I started off writing general features and ended up as Science Editor.

The Boar had a few similarities to KDE. It was staffed by volunteers, was successful (we won awards and stuff), diverse and quite large (I don’t know exactly, but well over a hundred contributors). However, unlike KDE, it was hierarchical. At the top was the Editor, who had ultimate power and responsibility. He or she made the call when someone threatened to sue for libel, or when one of the big national newspapers wanted access to one of our sources (it happened). Below the editor, each section had its own head, responsible for organising their team and making sure that their pages got done.

As a writer, you got told what to do and you did it. You could make suggestions and argue, but ultimately if your editor disagreed you could either accept it or go away. As editor, you had to get things done. If none of your writers turned up one week then you had to put the section together yourself and meet the weekly deadline.

Such an approach, with a named person responsible for every aspect of the project and sanctions (like getting sacked) for getting it wrong, meant that the newspaper always arrived on time and was generally of decent quality.

KDE is quite different. We don’t really have a hierarchy. Sure, there are people in each group that are almost defacto leaders – people listen to them and they push things to get them done, but there tends not to be one person whose approval you need to get to do something. There’s also no one to make you do things and no one who will have to sort things out if you screw up. This can be a good or a bad thing.

Costs and benefits of being KDE

Benefits of a hierarchy:

• If a named person is responsible for doing something, generally they do it
• Power lies with experienced people who are less likely to screw up
• People outside the organisation know who they should contact (even if they don’t know a name, they ask for ‘the Science editor’)

Costs of a hierarchy:

• If you are going to be held responsible for finishing something you get involved in, you may be discouraged from getting involved in the first place
• Power lies with experienced people who are less likely to take chances, try new things and make things better
• People outside the organisation are only aware of the leaders and they tend to get the credit (or blame) for the successes and failures of the organisation as a whole – so the people actually doing the work can feel that success or failure will have little impact on them personally

Herding Cats

Going back to my experience with the Boar and contrasting it with being an editor on the Dot: on the Dot we work by consensus and a few rules that we set. That sometimes means we’re a little slow to get things done because there’s no one person who has to do it. If everyone is busy then it doesn’t get done. However, it also means there are more checks and balances in place – I made a couple of major screw ups while working as an editor on the Boar because I didn’t have to consult other people, but on the Dot we rarely make really big mistakes that don’t get spotted before publication.

There’s also the question of time as a volunteer. If being involved in the Dot meant committing to getting things published within set deadlines and taking sole responsibility for that then I would have to resign tomorrow. We all have real jobs and other things to do and simply cannot make those kinds of commitments.

Conclusions

For me, KDE is in some ways flawed by its freedom – the fact that we can all, in theory, wander round doing whatever we want. Looking at it that way, it’s amazing we ever get anything worthwhile done. But in practice, the bonds withing teams and the consensus that we build mean that generally we do things pretty well. A more rigid structure would kill a lot of that and I think we would have a lot less people involved because it would be less fun and would require commitments that people simply cannot make.

Some more experienced gearheads sum up getting things done in KDE with the simple phrase of “herding cats“. Well to all our cat herders out there: thanks. You do a great job.

Tags: busy, community, Dot, Free Culture, herding cats

No, this is nothing deep It’s just that one of the many things I found intriguing about Akademy was learning the different ways that people refer to our apps and technologies – and those of other organisations. Generally, I think I’ll copy the pronunciation of people working on relevant app, so in case you are as clueless as I was (am?) here’s my cheatsheet:

• Krita. I had picked up “critter” as the pronunciation here and used it when introducing Lukas’s talk. However, he used “Kree-ta”, I think, so I guess that’s right
• Akonadi. Seems to be “ack-on-aah-dee”. I had always imagined the last bit rhymed with “die”
• Nepomuk. The “nep” but rhymes with “sep” in September, “o” rhymes with the “o” in FOSS and the last bit seems to vary between an “uck” and “ook” sound

There are a few that have some interesting splits:

• GNOME. This one fascinates me for its difference between native and non-native English speakers. In English of course we have gnomes pronounced without sounding the “g” and most native English speakers seem to say GNOME the same way with a silent “G”. Most people who don’t have English as a first language seem to sound out the “G” as “guh-nome”
• GNU. For me, this has always had the “G” sound included: “guh-noo”, but I also met some people who say “noo”, which confused me at first. It is easy to do
• openSUSE. This still splits people between the (original and best?) “open-soo-suh”, “open-soose” (which rhymes with “loose”) and “open-soo-zee”. At least everyone seems to agree on how to say “open”.
• Plasma. Even this has some subtle variations between a soft and harder (more like “z”) sound for the “s” and which syllable carries the stress

There are a few too that no one seems to know how to say:

• KRandRTray. Is it “kay-ah-and-ah-tray”? Is it “krand-ah-tray”? Or is it just that handy thing that does monitor stuff?
• Kopete. Maybe one of the developers knows? I heard “koh-pet”, “koh-peet”, “koh-pet-a” and maybe a few others too

And another that came up due to some other event that was on at the same time as Akademy:

• Uruguay. I know I say it wrong, I’m British after all and we do funny things with our “u”s, pretending we can use them like the “y” in “year”.

Tags: offtopic

Yeah, so I’m at Akademy. It’s awesome. But there are plenty of other blog posts saying that and I don’t feel I have a lot to add really, nothing that hasn’t already been on the Dot anyway.

So this is more about some of the things I’ve noticed about our community at Akademy: goals and consensus.

Goals

We have some massive tasks to do, particularly in promo. Or may be not even particularly in promo, but that’s the bit I’m aware of.

Some of these tasks will take years (having a sane, accepted brand structure for example) and many of them have already taken years (having a sane, accepted brand structure for example). The things that have been achieved since I’ve been watching KDE promo are those things with very well defined goals that are achievable in the short term. They don’t take us all the way to where we want to be, but they get done and make things better, even if not yet perfect.

These are things like making some general purpose leaflets, making the branding improvements, making the software labels, making a KDE booklet (almost done now). These are part of much bigger goals that are not done yet, but as tasks that, ultimately, could be implemented by a few people in a few months they looked achievable and were achieved.

Fluffy, as presented by Frederik - a highlight of the conference

Longer, larger plans cannot be done in one go in an organisation like ours. There are many subdomains on kde.org that are unmaintained as they were just too large as projects. A full time employee might have done them in months, for a volunteer it is a time commitment that leads to a distant in invisible future – with a good chance that when it is finally delivered it has been superseded by something else.

We are still guilty at times of getting bogged down in big discussions when what we need to do is ‘just do’, but that is getting better. It is preferable to paint the bike shed in a bright green colour that not everyone likes than not to paint it at all and let it rust away.

Consensus

Something that Aaron mentioned in his keynote speech and very relevant to the Dot and promo teams is the issue of consensus. We are different people with different priorities and different ways of doing things. So, of course, we don’t agree on everything. However, one of the things that really impresses me about KDE promo (and KDE in general nowadays) is the ability of people to express opposing views but then support the consensus decision and work to make it a success, even if they believe it is the wrong way to do things.

As with setting goals, working together on the second best solution (from your point of view) makes more sense than working on nothing at all until everyone agrees. That way, no one ever works on anything.

Akademy

Well ok, just a little bit about Akademy. Apart from the things that everyone else has mentioned it has been fascinating meeting people and putting comparing personalities on and offline.

It’s also been great to bump into quite a few people currently based in the UK and Ireland. I’ve always had the sense that the UK was pretty dead for KDE, apart from a few of the well known people, but there are far more of us than I thought.

Tags: akademy, branding, community, promotion

Well, I may have hinted at it already, but:

I'm going to Akademy

I’ll be doing a few things while I’m there, so here is a bit of shameless self-promotion:

• KDE Software for Scientists (lightning talk)
• Beyond Our Comfort Zone: Spreading KDE Software to Non-Free Platforms
• KDE Software for Scientists (BoF with Luca Beltrame)

There are many fascinating things going on and I’m particularly looking forward to learning more about Nepomuk, community building and the Plasma Media Center project. Well, actually there’s far more than that. I’d particularly like to go to Inge’s KOffice talk too but have unavoidable commitments elsewhere – I do have to turn up for my own talk, right?

Other than that, I’d like to sneak off and see at least a little bit of the football in some of the evenings, even though England’s chances of winning this year have suffered a minor setback (very unlikely -> impossible). Also, if someone local (or someone with luggage space) can bring a ball along perhaps we can sort out some jumpers for goalposts style KDE football action?

Other than that, there’s a lot of serious work to be done. Many of us will be trying to give those of you who can’t attend a taster of the action through regular blogging and the promo team will, I’m sure, do their best to make us Dot editors collapse from exhaustion.

Oh and thanks very much to KDE e.V. for assisting with my travel expenses – which by extensions means thanks to the companies and individuals who have chosen to Join the Game and support KDE.

Tags: akademy, Join the Game, koffice, Nepomuk, Plasma Media Center, thanks

Thanks very much to everyone who commented on the KDE Scientists post.

There’s far too much for a Dot article, but I’m trying to sift some general trends and a few quotes out of the mass of information and am writing the article at the moment.

The level of interest has taken both Luca and me by surprise (in a good way) and the information you gave us is very useful in helping us to plan the next steps.

Initially, I’ll be talking about this at Akademy and it also feeds in to Luca’s BoF. However, we are also setting up another quick session to try and get interested people together and share a few ideas. If you can, please come along to the KDE Science BoF on Wednesday at 1030.

If you can’t make it, don’t worry, we’ll be sharing our initial thoughts and there will be plenty of chance to give feedback and get involved as we try and develop this. All the comments on my last post will be considered and please feel free to add any further thoughts below or contact me via the About page.

Tags: akademy, community, Science, thanks