Re: On cooperative work [Was: Re: newbus' ivar's limitation..]

On 2 Aug 2012, at 18:47, Doug Barton wrote:

> Cheap copout. And quite sad, especially coming from a newly elected core
> team member.

FreeBSD is a volunteer project.  Our DevSummits are not run by a commercial organisation, they are run by volunteers.  I am not being paid to organise the Cambridge DevSummit, I am doing it in my spare time, as are the other people here.  The resources available are those that I can beg or borrow from the university and from other developers.  The attendance fee is £50, which is just about enough to cover the costs (we hope).  Comparing this to a professionally organised event like an IETF meeting, with large commercial sponsors (the IETF event you cite is hosted by Google), and complaining that it comes up short is insulting.  Saying 'solutions exist, therefore you must have the time, expertise, and resources to deploy them' is insulting.  It is not constructive.  If you are willing to make a helpful contribution, then it is welcome.  If you are going to complain, yet not offer anything constructive, then you are just trolling and I am wasting my time by reading your emails, let alone replying.

We have arranged to borrow a decent microphone and camera from the video conferencing suite in the department and have planned to use Skype to allow remote participation in two sessions.  If you wish to propose a more scalable solution that can be easily deployed here by people with no prior experience setting up such a system, then please do so.  

If you feel that you can do a better job organising a DevSummit than the people who have donated their free time to organise the ones in the past and the ones planned in the next few months, then I am certain that they would be very happy for you to assist in the organisation.  If your attitude is 'well, I'm not going to do anything, but it must be easy because no effort from me is involved so you should do it' then I find your attitude personally insulting and unproductive.

David