Communication skills

[Ben Tilly]

On 11/1/07, Russ Nelson <nelson at crynwr.com> wrote:
> Dag-Erling Smørgrav writes:
>  > I can't wait to hear what excuses you'll come up with this time...
>
> It's the same old excuse: a limited amount of time to volunteer.
> Everyone on the OSI board is a busy person.  Any suggestions other
> than "work harder"?  Note that volunteering other people's time
> doesn't go over very well in the open source world.

I suggest defining a process and keeping a checklist.  Then sticking to it.

What people are asking for does not really require any more time.
Instead it requires that you do things in the right order.  For
instance people are unhappy that we are finding out your decisions
from the press before we hear about it on the list.

Solution?  Don't send the press release without sending us an email.
How to do that?  Well I strongly suspect that when you send a press
release, you post it somewhere and email it to a list of people in the
press.  Well add this list to the list of people that you email it to.
 Then we'll find out about the decision on the list before we find out
about it from the press.

Likewise make sure you CC us when you tell the license author the
outcome of the decision.  You don't even have to write a new email,
just CC us!

I understand that it actually takes time to prepare and post minutes.
While that would be nice, I really think that there are some "almost
free" changes that would help a lot and do not require more time.
Only more organization.  (And that limited to remembering when this
list should be CCed.

Ben