On communications

[swaldman]

There was an issue I wanted to raise "informally" in the dev chat yesterday, but I had to leave before there was time. I have a certain amount of trepidation putting it in this perhaps-slightly-more-formal venue, so I want to emphasise before I start: This is (slightly) critical, but it is intended to be helpful. It is NOT intended as "wah Dreamwidth sucks you should do it better", and if it comes across at all that way please tell me so that I can revise. For the record, I still think DW is a fantastic project and that the staff are awesome :-)

I'm not active in Dreamwidth development at the moment, but I was for a year or so recently, and I hope to be again in the future, so I try to keep current on posts in this community. When I was active, and also more recently, I became concerned about communication between staff and volunteer devs. I noticed two related problems,

Firstly, that as somebody picking up bugs and working on them, I had very little idea what the "big picture" goals of the project were - what the big things that fu, Dre, and other heavy-hitters were working on were, and so where things might be going. It almost had the feel of a project that was considered "finished apart from tweaks" - and I don't think that that's how the staff think of DW (correct me if I'm wrong). I think the big work was going on, but in quiet. Perhaps that isn't a problem - it certainly didn't stop me from picking up bugs and fixing them - but I think it would help with community and motivation if there was a more coherent sense of "this is where the project is going".

Secondly - and closely related to that, perhaps - an unawareness of things that did affect me. For example, in the IRC chat last night I was unaware of what Foundation was. I had a look back through this comm's archive and found that it had been mentioned, but it had been mentioned almost in passing as something that was happening back in November last year - I couldn't see that anybody had actually explained what it was, so much as just said "we'll be using this now". That's not a specific gripe, merely an example of finding that major decisions were made without understanding the context, or sometimes not even knowing that they had been made at all until realising it through a chance remark some time later.
Now, I'm sure those discussions happened somewhere - but I suspect that they were on IRC, or perhaps in the Lounge, and never percolated out of those transient and/or invite-only spaces.

So, IMHO communication could be improved. That's the "problem" (perhaps too strong a word for it). I have a couple of suggestions that might help to address these:

1. A regular newsletter for developers. On a defined schedule, so that it doesn't slip - perhaps quarterly - explaining what the staff see as the big-picture items at the moment; the direction of things, any major projects that people are working on, and so forth. IMHO this would really help in terms of keeping myself and others feeling involved in the community.
2. If things are discussed and decisions made in private amongst staff, or in the Lounge, or even in public but on IRC (where folk who don't happen to be online won't know) - make a concious effort to make sure that these are communicated, presumably through this community. Try to reduce the amount of "things we know because we talked about it" and convert it into "things we discussed and then deliberately announced (or otherwise communicated)".

There we go; I hope that it's helpful, and that it can be seen that way.

Comments

[cesy]

The thing I don't understand is why news posts have become Denise only. Why can't Fu write some to save her wrists and keep them regular?

[ninetydegrees]

I don't have any useful to say except 'this'. I don't know if what you suggest is the best or doable but I felt myself nodding throughout your post. I think I've mentioned it elsewhere -- maybe in a previous discussion in someone's dev journal -- but, to me, among many other things, it also contributed to the feeling that there is less connexion and cohesiveness than there used to be.

[kareila]

Thank you for taking the time to articulate your thoughts, Simon. I've been having the same general sense of communication breakdown, and I hoped starting regular publicized chats would counteract that. The fact that we're having this conversation as a result of that effort is proof enough, I think. But I also like the idea a regular "big picture" update - that would be helpful too. I hadn't even realized that we hadn't connected the dots between the announcement of Foundation last year and the recent debut of the new site design on the community pages - it seems obvious if you study changelog entries like I do, but certainly not otherwise. :)

[marahmarie]

I think part of the problem (for myself, I can't speak for others, but perhaps others feel this way, too) is that DW seems like there's a closed group coding for it. Perhaps even within this group communication does not flow as easily as an outsider might assume it does, but to someone like me with little coding and/or no dev experience who at best could become a baby dev, the closed group appearance of the devs - the seeming front of sticking together, not making 'outsiders'* aware of what's going on, why it goes on, what the eventual goals are here and how to get involved - feels like a drawback; DW dev feels intimidating, like one might either get pushed out or not invited or kept in simply for not knowing enough to begin with or for having to learn - from scratch, from the bottom up - what to know to begin with.

(*There should be no outsiders here. Dreamwidth advertises itself as open source and open, period. Openness should rule. Welcomeness, for lack of a better word. The idea of joining or even helping out with dev does not feel welcoming, as things currently stand.)

I expect some flak and blowback for making this comment but I'm making it anyway because it hurts to think I could be rejected for not fitting into some kind of mysterious mold that is mostly unstated to become "accepted" by current dev. And I'm tired of the silence around that issue. No, no one else is complaining, right...ok, someone has to say it.

--What goes on in Dev needs to be explained more thoroughly somewhere for the teeming masses who aren't yet but maybe one day will want to try out being - or at least helping out with - dev. I follow changelog myself but if I didn't I wouldn't know, either, that we converted to Foundation nor that we converted from .bml to TT (I think - both changes began happening a while ago and my memory simply rusts out). At the time I read about each one of those changes, I had to Google them just to figure out what they were since changelog isn't exactly a comprehensive tool for learning what's what.

--If DW is to get more dev help I think it needs to try to be more open and inclusive about wanting more of us DWers to help. Conducting most of the site's chat and day-to-day stuff on IRC does not feel open or inclusive to me. You can say anyone can join in on it, but it doesn't feel good to be a stranger on there.

I'd say more but I have to go. I'll be able to post again later on today or tomorrow if there's anything anyone wants me to explain more.

[liv]

Thank you for opening the discussion here, swaldman. I do very much share these concerns. I do hang out in IRC quite a lot, and I follow every little community I can think of that might possibly have anything to do with dev, and I'm friends with at least some of the people one might think of as the dev community inner circle. And I still basically have no idea what's going on, big picture stuff beyond "Fu and Dre are working on the back-end / paying down technical debt".

I think Foundation is probably awesome, but I don't understand it. Same for OAuth, same for TT, same for the API project I've seen vague rumours of. But I'm scared to work on anything because most bugs are going to have something to do with how pages are displayed or how people authenticate or what API calls and hooks there are going to be. Anything I might do might be made obsolete in a few months, or might clash with the big mysterious projects I don't understand.

For a specific example, I want to make a minor accessibility fix to the update page. This is actually affecting the ability of users with specific learning difficulties to post entries, to my knowledge. But I don't dare to patch it because the new version of the update page has been in some limbo status of nearly finished for over a year, and I have no idea whether fu is still working on it, or if it's abandoned, or if it's waiting on some other major dependency, or if we've just decided that converting everything to Foundation is a higher priority, or what. I most certainly don't know if there's anything I can do to help move that project forward.