Comments on: monetary thinking

By: otte

otte — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 20:23:28 +0000

Yeah, Quim, I assumed that you are aware of these issues, and that you likely targeted a specific non-pgo audience in that post. But it was the post that made me realize this is a common thing. Plus, various Nokia employees have used this line of thought before, so I think it wasn’t a bad thing to use a Nokia post as an example. :)

By: Quim Gil

Quim Gil — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 20:05:21 +0000

Well, I was mainly thinking about a huge percentage of Slashdot noisy commenters really not knowing that Nokia has been actively developing and contributing to many free softwware projects through a bunch of engineers really knowing what they do. Nothing else.

A lot of the flaming last weekend was propagated by people that had enough reading the header of a header of a quote to start ranting. This didn’t happen though in i.e. Planet GNOME and I believe that the reason is that the % of people knowing about Nokia activities in the community is higher.

Or perhaps it was just a coincidence.

In any case it was not monetary thinking, even if I reckon that for a title of a blog post the sentence works well. ;) I have this journalist background and I have this tendency to think that everything going wrong has a problem in communication. I might still have a chance to be rescued thanks to daniels and other clever minds around.

Cheers

By: daniels

daniels — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 20:01:20 +0000

@Olivier: I don’t expect them to be saying stupid and/or incorrect things, of course. :) Hopefully no-one will be doing any of that. What we will hopefully see though is both sides getting a very clear message in their usual terms.

Developers will discuss technical stuff with other developers, and any noise that doesn’t affect the community will stick to the trade press. Of course, there’s still non-technical stuff we need to explain to the community, but we do have people who are more than capable of doing that (of which some have been for quite some time).

By: Olivier Crête

Olivier Crête — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 19:42:23 +0000

@daniels: And you expect the engineers not to listen to what is say to suits? I mean, some of us do read business news too..

By: daniels

daniels — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 17:33:04 +0000

Yes, we’re prodding people (both internally and externally) to sort out the messaging: if Quim was talking to everyone, we’d be set, but unfortunately at the moment, we’re stuck in the no-man’s-land of someone who is neither a good communicator nor a good engineer doing all our communication with engineers. :(

It looks like the way forward is that we’ll very carefully split our communications between audiences soon, so the suits can talk to suits, the engineers (including me) can continue to talk to engineers, and never (rarely) the twain shall meet.

By: MDK

MDK — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 17:28:40 +0000

Very well said Benjamin. I fully agree with this line of thinking.

By: Matthew W. S. Bell

Matthew W. S. Bell — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 17:08:34 +0000

otte++