History:Great Dispute

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Revision as of 22:25, 22 August 2006 by Dupuy (talk | contribs) (typo (Imported from MoinMoin))
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The Great Dispute

The dispute, which is still ongoing as of 2006-08-21. If the project survives this, it may be remembered as the Great Dispute.

Related Documents

Currently a random collection of 'places' and events of the dispute.

  • The MusicBrainzHaiku gives the shortest possible summary.
  • On August 15th, 2006 Robert writes a blog post entitled Developer changes, in which he states that he will remove Keschte's developer privileges.

The IRC Chat

On August 21st, 2006, from 2100 to about 2330 GMT, there was an IRC discussion about this problem (see chatlog), which still managed to be less voluminous than the UsersMailingList discussion.

During this discussion, the participants developed a list of the underlying problems that had led up to the dispute:

  1. differences in coding and communications styles
  2. lack of sufficient resources for developers (enough staging/testing servers, etc.)
  3. lack of guidelines or rules of behavior for the development team (and community)
  4. changes in MB as the community becomes larger, and more "businesslike"
  5. failures or deficiencies in the communications forums (e.g. arguments in Trac tickets)
  6. lack of clarity about the "final arbiter" of disputes
  7. missing development guidelines/concept + master plan

Generally, points 1 and 3 were felt to be the most significant, with 4, 5, and 6 also important.

To address these problems, a number of of guiding principles for the MusicBrainz community were outlined; these should eventually have their own WikiPages, once we come up with good WikiPhrases for them (add your suggestions to the Discussion below):

  • Create an environment that encourages volunteers (developers and others)
  • Transparency in communications (public) and process (documented)
  • Seek mediators for conflicts, ideally, even before they occur
  • Distribute responsibility, by asking for help, and growing teams
  • Needs of the community as a whole come before the demands of any individual

Although there wasn't time to discuss them in much detail, the moderator also came up with a list of various proposals (originally with two items numbered 3, and forgetting to include the last two items) that were suggested earlier on the mailing list, or which were mentioned in the IRC chat:

  1. Agree on and document development process
  2. Agree on and document conflict-resolution process
  3. Codes of conduct for developers and others
  4. Bug triage team for Trac
  5. Changes to rollout process (selectable server versions? live-data testing?)
  6. "Support groups" (like Wikipedia Esperanza, etc.)
  7. Improvements to development resources (more testing/staging servers?)
  8. Establishing web "forum(s?)" for better communication between developers/users
  9. Enhance mb server to collect immediate feedback from users

There is much that still needs to be done - some of these proposals must be made much more specific to be meaningful, and some of them are surely quite contentious (notably the first two or three). As a start, if you are interested in participating in one or more of these, please note your interest in the Discussion section below. As the mailing lists have been pretty swamped lately, it may be more effective to create wiki pages for each of these and to have the discussion there; please discuss the page names here before creating them (that will probably happen sometime later on Tuesday).

Discussion

WikiNames

Okay, here are my ideas for names for the principles: EncourageVolunteers, ParticipateOpenly, SeekMediators, DistributeResponsibility, and PutCommunityFirst. They can surely be improved (especially the second one, it's tough to capture in 2-3 words, especially since "open" and "transparent" are so abused as to have lost much meaning), and made more consistent, so please don't go and create them (yet). As for participation in the proposals, I'm afraid that moderating the IRC chat pretty much used up my available time - I will try to work on this and related wiki pages when I can, but that's probably all I can really commit to at the moment. @alex

Please add your thoughts here!

  • Alternatives for ParticipateOpenly: What about if you have a problem or there is a good common practice, then go and MakeItPublic! I have not Idea how the "it" could be better qualified to include "I belive we have a serious problem there", but not "Look at what that idiot has been doing". Maybe that is too complex to be caputured in a wiki phrase. :-) --DonRedman

Support Groups

I would like to work on realising #6 - after reading all the Wikipedia links about it and in case DonRedman can help me with his expertise. :) I think it's important to find an expressive name for such a group like Wikipedia has with "Esperanza". Suggestions? :) -- Shepard

Brainstorm for a Name

(just add to the list, no negative comments)

  • Esperanza
  • CupOfHope
  • RentAMoose - inspired by our unofficial mascot; expresses that you "rent" a mediator/helper when you have problems; unfortunately not a working WikiName :(
  • I would hope we could find a music-related name; a bit of searching turned up GleeClub, which I like quite a bit @alex

While we're at it, we could probably use a name for the bug triage group as well; I thought of PianoTuners but it seems a bit of a stretch...