Hi, To Jason, Daniel, Ryan, and Jean, please let me say that I feel your pain. I know that you would like to do more, and do it more quickly.
Occasionally, but not often, I wish that I was wealthy. This is one such time. If I were wealthy, I would take all of you who wanted to come along to Sao Paulo, and introduce you to the folks who run the Sao Paulo metro. It's huge. Millions of people use it every day. There are great demands on the system with little room for error. OOo is like that. I am extremely grateful for the irrepressible energy that Daniel, Jason, Ryan, and Jean bring to the project. However, I am also grateful for the steadfastness that Louis, Jacqueline and John bring to the project. The strength of open source is its diversity and its flexibility. We need to make those virtues scale. But please keep in mind the fact that this is a truly IMMENSE project, and we need to satisfy the demands of lots of divergent, strongly felt desires. Each of you, Daniel, Jason, Ryan, and Jean, have had an enormous impact on the community. Much of the work that you have done has been initiated outside the formal organizational structure, but has later been incorporated into it. I'm too jet-lagged from coming back from Boston to give examples, other than the OOoauthors, so sorry about that, but I think most people will agree with me. Louis, Jacqueline, and John bear enormous pressures that they can't always discuss on the general lists. I do believe that they are doing what they can to accomodate the divergent wishes of the community as best they can. Open source is like water. It flows around obstacles. OOoauthors is one example of a group of folks who were miffed by some issues and then went and directed their energy into something positive. I would never want to stifle your divergent energies (to the extent they diverge; not all of your energies are divergent; many of them are convergent), and yet I also know that being a lead of an open source project is really hard. With the Digital Tipping Point project, it is a teeny, tiny project, and yet the members of the group have want lists that require lots of work to fulfill, and yet those want lists are trifling compared with the desires of this group. It really kills me when a member of our group asks for something that I can't immediately deliver, because I am very grateful for their participation, but I am a very limited creature. So too for the leaders of this group. The strength of an open source group is a balance between the vigor of its members and the ability of the leads to survive burnout. So, while I am eternally grateful for the vigor that you all bring to OOo, being a worrier, I tend to worry for the burnout of our leads. Let's continue to push hard to be the best we can, but let's please be a bit more tender with our leads. They're only human. Let's all ask ourselves how we can increase the compassion factor of OOo and humanity as a whole. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
