This was written in response to a message with a list of demotivating behaviours in email interactions, like fingerpointing, aggressiveness, resistance when being called out for misbehaving, public humiliation for mistakes, and so on
There are times when I stumble on an instance of the set of things that were mentioned, and I think "ok, today I feel like doing some paid work rather than working on Debian".
If another day I wake up deciding to enjoy working on Debian, which I greatly do, I try and make sure that I can focus on bits of Debian where I don't stumble on any instances of the set of things that were mentioned.
Then I stumble on Gregor's GDAC and I feel like I'd happily lose one day of pay right now, and have fun with Debian.
I feel like Debian is this big open kitchen populated by a lot of people:
- some dump shit
- some poke the shit with a stick, contributing to the spread of the smell
- some carefully clean up the shit, which in the short term still contributes to the smell, but makes things better in the long term
- some prepare and cook, making a nice smell of food and NOMs
- some try out the food and tell us how good it was
I have fun cooking and tring out the food. I have fun being around people who cook and try out the food.
The fun in the kitchen seems to be correlated to several things, one of which is that it seems to be inversely proportional to the stink.
I find this metaphore interesting, and I will start thinking about the smell of a mailing list post. I expect it should put posts into perspective, I expect I will develop an instinct for it, so that I won't give a stinky post the same importance of a post that smells of food.
I also expect that the more I learn to tell the smell of food from the smell of shit, the more I can help cleaning it, and the more I can help telling people who repeatedly contribute to the stink to please try cooking instead, or failing that, just try and stay out of the kitchen.