Chris McDonough wrote: [snip]
Another way to avoid this in the future besides joining the committee would be for notable members of the Zope community to reach out on a regular (daily) basis to other Python-using communities. Offer them well-documented software, visit their sprints and conferences, try their alphas, join their IRC channels, participate in their maillists and so on. It's harder to do intercommunity politics daily in this way as opposed to "facing off" yearly, but it will have a higher, more lasting payoff.
I'm very much in agreement on this. Blogging is another way to reach out. Reach out and interact. It's indeed hard work to do this right. I am sitting on a few pieces of software that are either interesting to non-Zope people or in fact directly usable, but I haven't had the time yet to blog about them. I intend to start blogging on a more regular basis again soon.
It's "who you know", not "what you know" unfortunately, even in open source, as much as we like to believe in meritocracy.
That's true too. I'm a natural noise-maker, and I discovered that while as a result of this I embarrass myself in public on a regular basis, it also means a lot of people know who I am. That's a good thing. Regards, Martijn