[squeak-dev] [Meta] Community

Josh Gargus josh at schwa.ca
Sat Mar 20 21:42:12 UTC 2010


On Mar 20, 2010, at 1:33 PM, Jerome Peace wrote:
> 
> Randal's response was to post HERE that he considered it hostile. Not misguided, but hostile. He could also have written to Ken, reprimanding him privately.


How do you know that he didn't?  For instance, my "asshole" post was written after a private exchange with Ken where he made it clear that he didn't think that we was doing anything wrong by continuing to leave the blog up, even though 3 board members had already asked him to take it down by that point.  

If Randal had contacted him personally, he would probably have received these sorts of responses (these aren't direct quotes from Ken, who should correct me if they misrepresent him):
	"Do you even have the authority to ask me to take it down?"
	"Who gives the board the authority to ask me to take it down?"
	"Does one board member have the authority to ask me to take it down, or does it need to be a majority, or unanimous?"
	"Is there a designated board member in charge of communications who should be the one to ask me to take it down?"
	"Why hasn't the board written and posted rules about how it is supposed to handle these sorts of situations?"

Bert had it right when he said early on that "the election has clearly shown that the informal way we operate is generally fine with the community".  Ken is one of the few that is not fine with it, and rather than gracefully accepting the reality, he set up the blog as a passive-aggressive stunt to display his displeasure (at first, I gave his motivations the benefit of the doubt, but I'm now convinced that this was never about working cooperatively with the board).

I appreciate your call for peace and harmony.  However, what should have been done in this case?  More patience is never a bad thing, but I don't think it would have changed the ultimate result in this case.  If Randal had calmly added his request to take the blog down rather than calling it a hostile act, he probably still would have (justifiably) lost his cool when the response was "thank you for your opinion".  Of course, maybe Ken would have reacted differently, and the whole thread would have taken a different path, but it seems unlikely... he seemed quite committed to running his "experiment".

Back to fun hacking...
Josh


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