Hello

[Adriaan de Groot]

[ A different kind of welcome-wagon, more along the lines of what Aaron 
wrote ]

On Sunday 28 May 2006 17:17, JRT wrote:
> matt wrote:
> > My name is Matt, and I am, in short, very interested in the KDE project.
> > I have been using KDE for about a year now (religiously), and I feel that
> > it has become the best (no doubt the largest) open source software
> > development project in history. However, there are many areas in which it
> > lacks, and I want to change all that.
>
> > Therefore, I think while KDE has made some significant strides in
> > usability, there are many more tasks to be completed. I could give you a
> > thousand and one things that could be improved in KDE, from new
> > applications to small adjustments.

Keep in mind, Matt, that there are various ways of giving. In particular, 
giving orders is often not appreciated; giving patches *is*. Far more 
valuable than a list of 100 things that can be improved is a list of 10 
things that can be improved along with the actual improvements. The reason 
for this is that the people doing the work have more than enough to do 
already; but if you become on of the people doing the work you are not 
increasing the workload, but *decreasing* it. And that's a good thing. 
Flooding lists or bugs.k.o with hundreds of reports just produces 
discouraging numbers (e.g. if there are 10 bugs, that's an amount you can 
deal with; 14000 bugs is insurmountable).


> However, I must warn you that your efforts to make these improvements
> may not always be welcomed.  In fact, you will probably find that in
> some cases your efforts will be met with hostility.  I don't know what
> to say about this except that it is an unfortunate situation for which I
> can offer no real solution.

Let's phrase this in a slightly more positive fashion:

When you give advice or orders, they may be silently ignored; they may be 
vocally or rudely ignored. In either case, the community operates on a 
vaguely meritocratic basis and when you're new there is nothing that gives 
your advice or orders weight with the existing developers (or contributors). 
Make sure your advice is believable by showing that you can act on it first 
or by backing it up in a well-structured and documented way (for instance, 
the OpenUsability folks don't code, but they show how and why their advice is 
useful and by now they have the 'street cred' they deserve).

It generally does no good to whine about it if your advice is ignored.

When you give code, patches or other concrete things, they may be silently 
ignored; they may be vocally or rudely ignored. Remember that there are lots 
of written and unwritten rules about code; you should follow them. You may 
have written the wrong mailing list, or formatted stuff wrongly, or broken 
some coding style guideline. People may just be on vacation. If you are 
rudely ignored, don't punch your CRT -- punch a pillow if needed and remember 
that *one person* has been rude to you, as an individual. Try not to write 
off the entire group that that person is a member of. If you write useful 
things and contribute them in the right places, you will become a valued 
member of the community.

It generally does good to explain what your contribution does and why it does 
so.

Finally, remember: you are Free to use this software and do just about 
anything you like with it; you are Free (and sometimes forced) to contribute 
back; other people are Free to accept your work as an improvement of their 
own.

-- 
KDE Quality Team
GPG: FEA2 A3FE