[kde-community] Proposal: KDE Manifesto wording revision

[Eike Hein]

On Monday 11 November 2013 11:12:12 Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> so if the ONLY clause was somehow intended to address the “second class
> citizen” issue, it should be evident how it can not do so in its current
> form and also remain consistent with KDE’s current, consensus culture.

It's not evident to me.

Here's my approach to this. I'm thinking about and doing soul-
searching on:

* How did Aaron Seigo-of-KDE become Aaron Seigo-of-KDE?

* How did I get from submitting a ten-line patch to Konversation
  to becoming its maintainer later on, and going beyond Konver-
  sation to contributing to other KDE projects, becoming an e.V.
  member, all that good stuff that's been a lot of fun.

* I made most of KDE's new contributor accounts for I think about
  a one to one-and-a-half year stretch somewhere in 2010-2012. As
  in, during that time, for most of those cases I acted as the glue
  between KDE, the contributor and their supporters. I evolved some
  aspects of the process and wrote some of the documents we still
  send to the involved parties. So I've seen plenty of why people
  want to get an account, how they got in touch with KDE in the
  first place, and where they wanted to go from there.

Fortunately, I think we have plenty of success stories. I think
we're doing a lot better than many other FOSS communities, which
often fizzle-out with their original developer generation or
don't grow into areas they could be rocking. Or fragment. We've
been around for close to two decades, we're still productive,
we're still doing new things. Clearly, we're doing some things
right.

So I'm wondering:

* What do our contributor success stories have in common?

* What of our established practices helped things along?

* What was critical to enabling folks to do these things?

The stuff I wrote is what I walked away with and what my
current thinking on the matter is. It's not static; I'm
open to attempts to enhance my understanding.

So, can you explain to me (again, perhaps?) why this change:

* Improves the situation.

* My concerns are not warranted?

So far all I understood is "proxying changes still results in
code getting in, so the 'direct' in 'direct write access'
doesn't matter", which I think is an angle that completely
ignores the psychological side of things.


Cheers,
Eike