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Simon Poole

@luis_in_brief do I really need to dig out all the relevant material? Essentially all the friction was due to dev egos and the abuse was the other way around.

15 comments
Luis Villa

@simon I can’t speak to this specific situation, but I’ll simply say that I heard almost exactly the same words from the community about the Visual Editor at Wikimedia, various browser features at Mozilla, etc. etc.

Simon Poole

@luis_in_brief definitely some questionable expectations on both sides, but the point was that cooperation with Mapbox worked well at that time.

Luis Villa

@simon and @migurski’s point is that what you’re defining as “working well” left people burnt out, avoiding work, and getting away from the project as quickly as they could. Maybe it… wasn’t working that well?

Luis Villa

@simon @migurski and my point is that this isn’t specific to OSM; eg WMF chewed through product managers on a variety of projects like crazy, because using very basic design and product management techniques was “arrogant”, among many other attacks that they heard.

Simon Poole

@luis_in_brief there's a larger discussion to be have around OSS and developer - customer relationships.

In proprietary SW development we kept the devs behind multiple levels of support, sales and product management and employed trained people to deal with customer interaction.

What could possibly go wrong when you take those barriers and filters away.

Luis Villa

@simon at WMF we had highly trained product management and trained people to deal with customer interaction. Those people often burnt out because they were constantly insulted and attacked by the community.

Luis Villa

@simon but if you want to keep proving my point by telling me I don't know what I'm talking about, go ahead!

Simon Poole

@luis_in_brief I'm not saying you are not accurately reporting what you experienced at the WMF. I'm just saying that they are what should be expected when interacting with a large number of what are essentially end customers of the WMF.

And naturally the world would be a better place if it wasn't so.

Michal Migurski 📦

@simon @luis_in_brief Why expect bad interactions? Other international projects routinely use tools like codes of conduct and UX research to improve both software and the community interactions around it.

For example Python packaging is famously in flux and problematic but the foundations behind it support work like this from @brainwane:

discuss.python.org/t/pip-ux-re

I would love OSMF to have something like this but community leaders keep telling us that assholery is inevitable. /shrug

@simon @luis_in_brief Why expect bad interactions? Other international projects routinely use tools like codes of conduct and UX research to improve both software and the community interactions around it.

For example Python packaging is famously in flux and problematic but the foundations behind it support work like this from @brainwane:

Simon Poole

@migurski @luis_in_brief @brainwane if we were talking business models I would point out that you are mixing up a b2b situation with a b2c one.

Michal Migurski 📦

@simon @luis_in_brief We’re not talking business models, so how is that relevant?

Simon Poole replied to Michal Migurski 📦

@migurski @luis_in_brief you are taking a situation with interactions of what are essentially peers in the same space and saying what works there, works in a situation were the relationship and the motivation to engage are very different.

Short: dev to dev vs dev to user.

How many times have you interacted with the engineer that designed your washing machine?

Michal Migurski 📦 replied to Simon

@simon @luis_in_brief I think you’re misreading the link I shared, maybe try again?

Simon Poole

@luis_in_brief Just like in any other business with larger customer bases.

What do you think working on a help desk for example for your average consumer good product is like?

Simon Poole

@luis_in_brief
The problem is that "we've" created this completely wrong expectation that this all works frictionless, everybody is always polite (at an US-level) and then we throw completely unprepared junior US-based OSS devs in to the cold water and are surprised when they don't like it.

Particularly after we just told them that they are now the new heroes and everything they say will be taken as gospel.

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