Jenn Vesperman wrote:
I guess the thing here is that while competition brings out the best in
some people, it brings out the worst - or completely suppresses -
others.
I'm not saying 'stop doing things your way', I'm saying only 'ok, fine,
so a competition based culture works for you - please don't assume it
works for everyone'.
If you already knew that .. then sure, we can discuss it further. If you
didn't, now you know. Feel free to ask questions and try to explore the
idea. :)
I agree with your comments, Jenn, and would add my own pet theory, which
is this:
In an environment where the "innovate through competition" strategy has
been used a great deal, the limits of success for that particular
strategy will be reached, and some of it's limiting flaws exposed. A
good example within debian would be the time wasted by flamewars.
In that situation, the use of different strategies (for example
"innovate through cooperative effort"), may prove to be very successful,
since they are not going to suffer from the same particular flaws as the
dominating strategy, and they will explore areas of approach that have
not already been used by previous attempts.
I'm not claiming that some strategies are necessarily better than
others. But I do believe that using a variety of approaches is likely
to succeed better than any single approach. Of course this is already
going on within debian :) But I do think that the debian-women project
is going to help debian as a whole to broaden its outlook and that
debian as a whole will benefit from this.
Helen.
