Re: Quality of email postings

JoshuaKramer wrote:
>
> > I suggest you leave things as they are. Get used to it. As for the new
> > people, such as the sales and marketing people, please don't worry about
> > them as they deal with people not code. They're adept in this kind of
> > environment and all would do well to watch them in action.
>
> It's all really a matter of perspective.  In my opinion this particular
> brouhaha got started as a result of a) The EnterpriseDB posting, and b)
> the fact that the person approving press release postings works for
> EnterpriseDB.  Obviously the perspectives of those who work for
> EnterpriseDB are different than the perspectives of those who work for
> CMD, and those are even different than the perspectives of people like me
> who don't work for any consulting firm.

Just to be concrete, I think the EnterpriseDB discussions where quite
focused, mostly.  The things that stick in my head from the past are
discussions about the blue Italian t-shirts, the wiki discussion, and
various other threads.  Josh Berkus already brought up the bike shed
effect and I think it is a useful concept in getting focus:

    http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/2007-07/msg00983.php

Let me tell you what one of the sales people told me, "I start Monday
not having read email over the weekend, and I have 80 new messages, 79
are from advocacy about some trivial topic".  And I have to say I feel
that way too sometimes.  Now perhaps it is because I am not as
interested in advocacy as other PostgreSQL topics, which is kind of
true, but part of it is that bike shed discussions get really long and
are usually quite uninteresting.  Perhaps there is no way to improve
that --- I am just asking.

In general, I do like the advocacy postings because they discuss how
PostgreSQL relates to the real world.

And way off topic, does anyone else have trouble saying "advocacy"?
Email me privately and I will post a summary.  FYI, this is a good way
to condense discussion threads and might work for other topics.

--
  Bruce Momjian  <bruce@momjian.us>          http://momjian.us
  EnterpriseDB                               http://www.enterprisedb.com

  + If your life is a hard drive, Christ can be your backup. +