Ideas/concepts

- Good cop/bad cop
- Scarcest resource of an OSS community is ATTENTION
- Build a strong community
- Some poison people can be converted

- *** Document
  - policy
  - software
  - discussions (mailing list)
  - rediscuss/present IRC discussions on the mailing list
  - Those who do not document history are condemned to repeat it

- Culture of politeness, respect, and TRUST
- Social misfits
- OK to not please all the people all of the time
  - Know when to give up
- Don't feed the energy creature (old usenet adage)
- Don't give assholes "purchase"
- Don't engage them
- Don't get emotional
- Always pay careful attention to a newcomer, even if they seem 
  poisonous--they could have good things to say
- Look for the fact under the emotion
- Use statistical analysis to persuade others that someone is poisonous
  (intra-thread, intra-list)
- The Noisy Minority
- Always look to convert people
- First, do no harm
- The importance of trust
- The self-perpetuating culture

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STORIES
- Files: eager, but an attention sink
- Julian Foad: The perfect is the enemy of the good
- The date guy who wanted his name in code
- The malloc vs. pool guy
- Asshole leaves irc because we're too nice
- Tom Lord
- ESR "Shame on you"
- GCC folks in search of the perfect VC system
- Apache Avalon
- Duncan's absense
- GDB (ask jimb)

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DISRUPTIVE TO PROGRESS
- Perfectionists
- Process obsessed people
- People who reply to every mail in a thread
- power plants

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* DISRUPTIVE TO COMMUNITY

Telltale signs to look for


* communication annoyances
  - silly nickname
  - multiple nicknames in different communication mediums
  - overuse of CAPITAL LETTERS, and excessive punctuation!!!!!!!!!

* general lack of clue
  - inability to pick up on the "mood" or common goals of the community.
  - incessant RTFM questions 

* hostility
  - insulting status quo, rather than questioning it
  - angrily demanding help, rather than requesting
  - attempted blackmailings
  - paranoia:  accusations of conspiracy
 
* conceit
  - refuses to argue with other opinions
  - makes sweeping claims about project's future success
  - re-opens topics that are long settled, without re-reading archives
  
* lack of cooperation
  - willing to complain, but not help fix
  - unwilling to discuss design
  - too insecure to take criticism

* sucking attention away
  - grandiose calls to action
  - filibustering:  replying to every post
  - attempts to purposely rile people

 
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"The 'you're too nice' thread"

[[[ Edited for capitalization, punctuation, grammar and flow ]]]
[[[ for improved readability.                                ]]]

--> brewtus has joined #svn

brewtus: Subversion sucks.  This is quite a nuisance.

sussman: If you need help, then ask.

brewtus: I want to cvs someone's files.  No, I just want to gripe.
        But this person is hung up on this thing called Subversion so
        he has svn instead of cvs.

sussman: So get an svn client and checkout his sources.

brewtus: So I go and download this Subversion thing...can you
        configure make make install Subversion like you can cvs?  Of
        course not.  I blame him more than the subversion people.

ghudson: What makes you say you can't configure; make; make install?

sussman: Just because *you* can't ./configure; make; make install
        doesn't mean there's a big widespread bug.  People do that
        with the svn tarball every day.

brewtus: I didn't say there was a bug.

sussman: Do you think we would have released the tarball if something
        that fundamental were broken?

brewtus: I am just griping about this bozo.  I just have to install
        expat or libxml.  *sigh*

sussman: Those things are usually pre-installed on most systems.

ghudson: Uh, I ask again: why do you think you have to do these
        things?

sussman: ghudson: neon requires expat or libxml.  We assume it's on a
        system.

ghudson: Oh.  Sorry, carry on.

brewtus: checking for expat.h... no
        configure: error: no XML parser was found: expat or libxml 2.x
        required
        configure failed for neon

scanline: In my experience, if svn is hard to install it's usually
         your distro's fault :)

brewtus: Actually this system has expat.  I just have to put it in the
        include headers or whatever the hell.

sussman: Is this guy using an apache server?  Perhaps you should just
        grab a binary.

brewtus: I don't know, he just says svn...

digitaltrog: Which distro are you on?

brewtus: FreeBSD

holsta: brewtus, there's a Subversion port for FreeBSD...you don't
       have to do anything.

brewtus: Yah, I know how to do this...anyhow my constructive criticism
        is:
          #1 Make the INSTALL file more user friendly and
          #2 Maybe make the neon/xml stuff more automagic.

sussman: Um.  That's pretty vague criticism.  Not useful.  :-)

holsta: Uhm, that just means more stuff for package people to wipe.
       I've got a port for OpenBSD here, and the stuff in the tarball
       annoys me already. Makes it hard for me to use the dependency
       of
       my system. Don't ask the people to add more to the tarball.

sussman: Just cd into the ports tree and make the port.

brewtus: You people are ruining my rant...I came here looking for an
        argument...you are too helpful and friendly.

sussman: :-)

brewtus: When the hell do you come to an IRC channel and everyone
        tries to help you?  Blah.

<-- brewtus has quit

sussman: If you want a community fully of ranting flaming people, I
        suggest any Apache Java project.  :-)