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

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

A while ago I asked “what’s stopping you from joining KDE?”. It was really a rhetorical question but, thinking about it, it is something I’d be interested to hear answers to.

There’s an interesting blog post (thanks to Lydia for sharing this on Identica) that points to some possible reasons. It seems the top ones are:

1. Not enough time
2. Not sure where or how to contribute
3. I’m not confident enough in my own skills

What stopped me?

Thinking back, there were a few things that delayed my own involvement with KDE. Time was a big one: I didn’t want to be that guy who turns up, makes some suggestions and promises but never delivers, so I waited for when I might have more time. I knew where I would start (Dot articles) but there was a bit of a lack of confidence in my own knowledge too – that I’d get found out writing about stuff I don’t understand as well as all you guys. I still get that , but hopefully it just makes me do my research a bit better

There is never a good time

Eventually, I realised that I will probably be busy for the rest of my working life. Actually I realise now that I had far more time when I thought I was too busy than I have now. The result is that I am that guy who turns up, makes suggestions and promises to do things but doesn’t deliver Most of us are. But the thing I realise now is that a lot of people doing some of the things that need doing some of the time can achieve quite a lot. It really is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness.

You don’t know enough, but then – who does?

When you start contributing, you’ll likely realise you don’t really know what you’re doing and chances are you will screw up (but people are nice about that, generally). But you will be bringing in some skills that others don’t have. Perhaps you’re a native speaker of a language we need to use for a press release (so you can instinctively see when something doesn’t sound quite right) or you have language skills that allow you to translate useful information or act as a bridge to KDE communities around the world. Perhaps you have useful contacts in education, among artists or in science that allow you to put (potential) users in touch with developers.

Start where you want to start

The possibilities for contributing to KDE are vast. Jos (and us other promo peeps) would like your help, but there are plenty of other options too. There can be few application teams that wouldn’t welcome more developers and we always need artists. Whatever you want to do, you can get involved.

So, why not contribute?

If you would like to help out, but there is something holding you back then why not tell us? We need people and if there are things we can do better to make contributing easier it would be great to know.

Tags: busy, community, get invovled, help needed, promotion

It’s been one of those busy weeks that come up from time to time, both on the work front and a few personal things to deal with (both have been hard work, but good as possible results all round). The net result is that I’ve felt like I haven’t really had the time for KDE stuff, though I’ve found a few minutes here and then to review the odd Dot article. Oh, and I did get around to doing a new WordPress install (having slightly borked the first one trying to shoehorn it in to the old site structure and design, to the extend that a routine update I tried on another server broke a lot of stuff). I clearly don’t have time to maintain anything more than a blog from the old site structure I inherited, so I’ve abandoned that idea. Hopefully the redirects will work ok and I haven’t just spammed the Planet (I tried not to and nothing bad seems to have happened so far – apologies if I have though).

Anyway, plenty of other people have been very busy on the promotion front. Justin and co have been continuing to do great work with Camp KDE and the numbers of attendees there are rising nicely. Jos and others have continued to work on things in the community wiki which is starting to get to be a really useful resource.

Excitingly, there seem to be several new people appearing on the kde-promo mailing list (although it’s possible that they’re old hands and they just haven’t been around for a while). Long-time KDE blogger Liquidat (aka Roland Walters) has an article in progress for the Dot, which is pretty awesome.

Most encouraging of all was the response to the Krita appeal for funding. I didn’t have any doubt they’d reach their target, given the amount to the raised and the quality of the proposal, but I was surprised at the speed with which the target has been reached. Perhaps an approach to consider for other application teams in the future, though it’s probably something that needs to be not done too often.

After a busy Monday, I’ll hopefully be a bit more active again. Getting a poll together to choose a text for third party developers to show their application’s affiliation with KDE is top of my hit list and I also have a mostly done Dot article that should hopefully be appearing towards the end of the week.

Busy times

Tags: busy, Camp KDE