Conducting Lubuntu team business in public (was: Re: Disabling lightdm guest login )

[Jonathan Marsden]

On 04/29/2012 05:20 PM, Chris Druif wrote:

> Also it doesn't look "professional" when the "experts" are
> disagreeing in public. Just my thoughts.


On the contrary, I'd suggest that a well run open source community
consciously and deliberately conducts as much of its business as
possible openly -- "in public".  The less that we feel a need to hide
concerning how we operate, the more transparent we can be, the better.

For more on this as it relates to open source software projects, note
that Chapter 2 of the book "Producing Open Source Software" by Karl
Fogel includes a section titled "Avoid Private Discussions" that is very
relevant.  See http://producingoss.com , and in particular see
http://producingoss.com/en/setting-tone.html#avoid-private-discussions .

Of course, that does not mean we should be impolite or call each other
names in public!  Well-reasoned polite disagreement about relevant
operational and technical matters within the team seems to me to be
entirely reasonable and professional.

Since we only have one mailing list, and have a community that is spread
over many time zones, this one list is where that kind of team-internal
discussion is most likely to happen.  If the volume of such traffic
becomes so large that it impedes use of the list for user questions and
issues, we should of course create a new (but still open, public,
archived) list to separate it out, as a matter of convenience and
efficiency.

Incidentally, in real face to face life, I have been known to disagree
with my boss at work sometimes... is that "unprofessional" of me?  I
think much depends on *how* I disagree -- and I submit that the same is
true online for the Lubuntu community.  If you ever feel I have been
rude to, or personally attacked, anyone in the Lubuntu community, please
do "call me out" on that.  I've signed the Code of Conduct, and I do my
best to operate within it in the Ubuntu community.

Jonathan