Re: Community Relations WAS: PostgreSQL.org Design Proposal

Folks,

> More on this later in a separate email and please excuse me for making you
> (I mean all of you) once again read my sarcastic comments.

One of the joys of working with OSS is the chance to work with people of very
different cultural backgrounds than yourself. This means, though, that:
a) each person needs to re-read their own e-mail and see if it could be
considered offensive, and
b) each person needs to NOT assume that words were meant in a hostile way and
take offense, but to give posters the benefit of the doubt.

This is not just about Alexey; there are plenty of other people on our lists
who have very different attitudes about acceptable phrasing. We didn't grow
up in the same countries, social classes, schools or families, so people have
to relax a bit and assume goodwill no matter what the words look like.

When I was on OOo, we had a Linux activist from the Bronx join the group. As
you Americans can probably imagine, he quickly offended pretty much all of
our British and Asian participants. For anyone who doesn't know, the Bronx
is a place where "Hey, asshole!" is considered a friendly greeting -- so he
actually told a couple of people "Don't be a dickhead," which was local slang
for "you made an error" but you can imagine that a volunteer from Vancouver
didn't read it like that.

It's a funny story now but I had to send a *lot* of private e-mails to keep
from losing community members.

--
--Josh

Josh Berkus
Aglio Database Solutions
San Francisco