Re: Add Code of Conduct [Another RFC or not now?]

[Graham Percival]

On Sat, Feb 08, 2020 at 11:41:11PM +0100, David Kastrup wrote:
> Graham Percival <address@hidden> writes:
> > Within 2-3 weeks, I had squandered all of the good feelings and energy
> > sparked from that meeting.  I view that as my worst blunder from all
> > my years of involvement with LilyPond.
> 
> Hey, I had chalked this up to my slate.

Oh my goodness, I sincerely hope not!  I've always had very high
regard for your programming ability and diligence, and I can't
recall taking offense at any "harsh truths" that you threw my way.
(I was sometimes disappointed that they *were* true, but I never
blamed the messenger!)

No, there were a lot of other things happening in my life at the
end of 2012:

- I had finished writing my PhD dissertation, and I always viewed
  "completing a degree" as a chance to take stock of my life.
  I started the grand documentation project in 2007, 1 year before
  finishing my Masters', with the explicit goal of training my
  replacements so that I could quit in good conscience.  That new
  project was an attempt at another big project as I left lilypond
  again.

- I knew that my first postdoc job was at a university which had
  the "charming" idea of laying claim to all the intellectual
  property that I created, so I would be legally unable to
  contribute to lilypond.  (At least, not able to contribute code.
  Given that my main contribution at the time was emails and
  organization, I could have completed a bit, but it might have
  been awkward.)

- I knew that my publication record was not stellar, and no amount
  of time spent on lilypond would lead to a publication (of the
  type that mattered in my branch of academia, i.e. a "tier 1"
  IEEE or ACM journal).

- it had been almost ten years since I'd actually composed any
  music, so I was increasingly wondering why I was spending 10-15
  hours a week on LilyPond.

> In retrospect, I saw LilyPond in need to grow roots and you saw
> it in need to grow wings.

Yeah, that was another big mistake on my part.  In almost every
other instance of "hopeful wings" from 2009 to 2012, I'd argued in
favour of stability and keeping things moving (albeit slowly),
instead of taking risks.

> You've clearly been the much better organiser and motivator: the people
> who still keep the "shop running" are doing so in processes originally
> set up by you and given meaning by you.

Yes -- that's the "stability" part that I'm good at.

> And I am basically drawing blanks when thinking about how to
> make people pick up the slack when someone ultimately leaves.

My dream was always to have a "volunteer funnel".  For
non-programmers, find people willing to reliably do small tasks,
such as LSR, bug reports, translations, and documentation edits.
Then, after a few months of that, encourage them to move on to
more complicated tasks.

The tricky thing is:
- you need to expect at least 50% of people to flake out.  It's
  not because they're bad people, it's not because the lilypond
  community are bad people... that's just the nature of volunteer
  organizations.  I see it offline, too.  People understimate
  the difficulty of tasks, overestimate their time & energy, and
  underestimate the possibilty of other demands on their time
  (jobs, families, hobbies, etc).
- so the person organizing the volunteers (or ideally, the
  volunteers in a specific area such as bugs) needs to constantly
  be recruiting.  Well, not necessarily *constantly*, but if you
  ever think "ok, we've got all 7 days of bug reporters handled so
  I can relax", that's a danger sign.  If they're working well,
  then encourage 1 or 2 to move to a different task, and recruit
  new volunteers to fill the gaps.
- equally important, the "volunteer wrangler" needs to be
  emotionally prepared to see a lot of effort walk out the door
  when volunteers realize that they can't continue.

> I still think we should have been able to make this work better between
> us but have no idea how.

No, there was no fault on your side.  And to be fair to myself, it
wasn't really a "fault" on my side -- it was definitely time for
me to move on.  I should have handled it more gracefully (so yes,
I blame myself for that).  But there was nobody to blame for my
leaving the project; if anything, I should have left a year or two
earlier.  It was simply not a good fit with my life at the time.

Cheers,
- Graham