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

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

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

I do hope Google Translate has got those right – and I love German for its abundant use of the letter K (for the curious they are, hopefully: Portugese, Hindi, Russian, Spanish, Chinese (simplified), English/French and German)

KDE: a global community

Well, KDE “is an international technology team” – it says so on the website We localise our software and being part of KDE is a great way to meet and mix with people of other cultures. Within Europe and North America, even language barriers are not too much of an issue – luckily most people seem to speak English and so we’re pretty good at picking up news from across Europe, the US and Canada.

But there’s a lot more to KDE than that.

We have vibrant communities in Brazil and some great work coming out of India (just check our list of GSoC participants). We’re attending events in Africa. We have hackers in Iran. We have… well, I get the sense I’m hugely ignorant about what we really have. Do we report enough on what is going on around the world?

It is great that we have regional communities. It is far better to be invited in to KDE by someone who understands your culture and speaks your language. However, the KDE website and the Dot should be the central home for all of KDE – www.kde.org is afterall probably the first place that many people find.

The Dot features application releases (doing ok there), interviews (quite euro/North America-centric) and reports on events that we attend (very Euro/North America-centric).

What can we do to make better communication between our teams and to make the Dot better reflect the activities of our worldwide community?

We have a few thoughts and we’d like to invite you to attend our Akademy Marketing team BoF on Tuesday at 1600 to give us your ideas too.

If you can’t make it to Akademy or the Marketing BoF then please feel free to add thoughts here and let us know what we can do or what you can do. Join kde-promo@kde.org or contact one of us directly (you can find my details on the About page here).

Tags: akademy, communicating, community, international, promotion

First, in the absence of any nice graphics yet and not wishing to encourage puppy killing by using Paul’s great graphic, I have to settle for:
Update: yay, we have an image:

I'm going to Akademy

A big thanks to everyone on the organising team for their efforts so far and for all that they still have to do In their wisdom they have decided that I get to talk at you for a bit. I was a little surprised by that (in a good way) as I thought at least the main topic I chose might have been picked up by someone a lot better qualified, so now I had better crack on and get something decent written…

Getting there – I’m a hypocrite

Tampere looks like a great place to be, but unfortunately it is not the easiest place to get to without flying (which is bad due to carbon dioxide emissions, air pollution around airports and getting stranded every time a volcano erupts…). I found various options for getting from the UK to Finland, but the quickest would take three days each way and costs two-three times more than flying, so I’m doing the latter. However, if you live in northern or eastern Europe there are some other possibilities by train, coach and ferry so please take a moment to consider those before booking your flight. Yeah, I know – I’m flying and most of you are probably flying too – lecture over

By the way, if you are flying then Skyscanner is a pretty excellent flight finder that I’ve used a number of times (and this time too).

Plans for before and after

I’m arriving in Helsinki in the evening on Friday, hoping to get to Tampere by bus or train around midnight and perhaps meet a few people in Tampere or at the hostel. After Akademy I plan to head to Helsinki on Saturday morning and then stay there for a night (somewhere) before catching a flight back on Sunday evening. So, if anyone else plans on doing similar, has recommendations for accommodation or sights in Helsinki – or nearby – please let me know.

Tags: akademy, community, environment, travel