[Zope-dev] how to help Martijn (how can we have better discussions?)

[Martijn Faassen]

Martin Aspeli wrote:
> Martijn Faassen wrote:
> 
>> Instead, we had endless debates about whether it was a legitimate
>> concern for the ZTK maintainers. I'm of course still right that it is.
>> I have wonderful and coherent reasons to support my position just like
>> everybody else does who disagrees with me. It's not really very
>> important anyway. We're here together on this list to work together
>> beyond the ZTK itself.
> 
> I think one problem is that we speak about abstract groups of people, 
> "the ZTK maintainers", or "the Zope 3 maintainers" and now "The ZopeApp 
> maintainers". These groups don't really exist in any cultural sense. 
> They don't have an identity in the same way that, say, the Plone 
> maintainers or the Grok maintainers (and possibly, the Zope 2 
> maintainers) do. It's hard for any one group to make their voice heard 
> when no-one knows if they're part of that group or not. :)

Agreed that this is a problem, though it's hard to find a balance here. 
It's useful to speak of roles that are a bit more abstract than "me and 
my apps". So, in that sense Zope 3 maintainers is a useful concept 
instead of just mentioning, say, me, and Marius and others who have to 
deal with Zope 3 applications on various occasions.

It's also useful to speak about such groups if you want to actually 
change the focus of energy in this community. That's where the idea of 
ZTK maintainers come from. It's a convenient way to say: "we are going 
to care about zope.app. stuff less together, and focus on something else".

But in the end this mailing list is just the community of people who 
talk and work together here, no matter what roles they have.

> I think in general, it's more useful to talk about "the Zope community" 
> until such time that these groups actually self-organise, if indeed they 
> ever do.

You still need to be able to talk about groups with various concerns. We 
do have some organizational structure in place for ZTK, for instance. 
That was one of the points: having a decision making infrastructure at all.

>> I know we have had a lot of problems reaching conclusions in such
>> discussions in the past, but we can't learn how to do better at that if
>> we don't. And we are going to do better if I can help it.
> 
> I think we normally do reach conclusions, thanks often to people like 
> you tirelessly summarising and soliciting input. I don't think that part 
> is broken. Big discussion threads usually mean people are either 
> passionate about or highly dependent on Zope as a framework, or both. 
> I'd take that over apathy any day.

We definitely have problems. It takes a lot of energy, too much, to get 
bigger changes through. A bit of a slow-down for big changes isn't 
necessarily a bad thing, but all too often it makes people feel they 
have to work around zope-dev and just do things somewhere else (or anyway).

In the past, we frequently blocked on issues that just never reached a 
conclusion because nobody was there to say "yes go ahead" at the right 
time. We also regularly forgot conclusions. We've improved somewhat over 
the course of the last year, but we need to improve a lot further in my 
opinion.

Regards,

Martijn