Constructive process / intentional destruction?

Published by on 18 August 2007 at 17:38 in Culture of Appreciation, General Info, Leadership Circle and Participation. 1 Comment Tags: brainstorm, constructive, destruction, intentional, leadership, process.

http://www.couchsurfing.com/group_read.html?gid=429&post=329495

Hi, (in reply to [0], www.couchsurfing.com/group_read.html?gid=429&post=321705#pos… for “proper threading”)

guess what, I was one of those people only wanting to discuss ideas for a long time [1]. At some point of a full year of volunteering as a coder[2] and trying to make sure the very ideas from this group actually got somewhere [3], it became evident that in order to get those constructive ideas heard and implemented, improvements would need to be made. So I and others whose input you’re so willing to discard tried our best, sadly many of our suggestions and constructive efforts often went ignored by the LT [3, 4, 5, 6, 7]. Also, the “critical” tone is all too easy to obtain when valid questions and due criticism [8] repeatedly go unanswered.

I feel it’s important to let others here know what exactly they are dealing with. I feel it’s a bit silly being all positive and hoping ideas somehow will get heard, when there are still no decent mechanisms to make that happen and no apparent willingness (historically) to actually listen to people who provide ideas to deal with the situation EVEN when they are the ones actively working on the improvements.

Besides, I feel the not-so-gentle wish of yours of all of “us” to take a hike with all the criticism based on EXPERIENCE (the case for me, Kasper, and the ones who already moved on) of dealing with the CS organization is just another form of censorship, albeit softer than simple deletion all of the “negative” posts. If asking questions and telling the truth is deemed as unconstructive and evil, I sincerely think CS is headed the wrong way.

FYI: the leadership team is far more willing to bring in “fresh” people than to keep around the old ones (who were actually doing a sizeable chunk of the actual work [9, 10, see especially contributions by Kasper and Matrixpoint] instead of just talking, and were respected by their volunteer-peers if not by the admins/leaders), once they start getting “difficult” – so beware, a year from now the situation for many of the new enthusiasts could well best be described as “told you so”. An actual quote from some leaders: “The coders are just whiners, so let’s just get new ones” – culture of appreciation [11], anyone?

Actually, there’s nothing new under the sun, has anyone ever wondered what happened to COSMIC GIRL, DANI! (former admins), CAIRONA (European Collective 2006 co-organizer) or Aparna (Former CS Country Ambassador for India)?

FYI 2: Blast from the past [12], many issues were questioned more than a year ago, yet we STILL don’t have all the answers. Make your own conclusions?

Anu

[0] www.couchsurfing.com/group_read.html?gid=429&post=321705
[1] www.opencouchsurfing.org/User:Anu (list of my public, CS-related group posts)
[2] www.opencouchsurfing.org/2007/08/17/making-it-official-anu-l…
[3] wiki.couchsurfing.com/en/Feature_development_process
[4] wiki.couchsurfing.com/en/Technical_Goals_of_the_New_Zealand_…
[5] wiki.couchsurfing.com/en/Talk:Paris_Collective
[6] wiki.couchsurfing.com/en/Idea_to_feature:_lessons_learned
[7] wiki.couchsurfing.com/en/Central_transparency
[8] wiki.couchsurfing.com/en/Community_feedback_from_Mumbai
[9] www.opencouchsurfing.org/CS_commit_statistics
[10] www.opencouchsurfing.org/CS_bug_statistics
[11] www.couchsurfing.com/group_read.html?gid=1589&post=283060