[HacktionLab] ogg camp

[yossarian]

On 6/21/11 5:32 PM, Ben Green wrote:

> I think though Sy that you seem to saying that Free software is really
> good, whereas in fact lots of it sucks. Lightworks is in Beta and not
> even available for Linux. LibreOffice has a sucky spreadsheet
> implementation. Crabgrass is a pain in the arse. Ubuntu is not stable
> enough and Debian is not accessible enough. These are all opinions of
> course, but I'm not the only one with them by a long shot.

Given Sy's original list, I feel a little left out.  Hyperactive sucks
in lots of ways too. :)

But I'm working on it right now and it'll suck a bit less by the end of
tonight. It used to suck a lot more, and with the help we've been
getting in UI design and all the usability contributions that people
have been making, plus the total redesign of the upload systems which is
targeted at making the upload story a lot nicer, its suck factor is
hopefully going down slowly but steadily.

I am not put off too much by the discussion people have been having -
yeah a lot of our software sucks.  But jesus, you should see the shit
that people in FTSE 250 companies are routinely forced to work with. I
mean, most of it makes Debian Sarge look like an all-expenses-paid Club
Med vacation, where servants attend to your every need and you bask in
comfort and well-being.

So, everybody take a few steps back and get some perspective maybe - is
our software steadily sucking less? Yes.  Could it get a lot better?
Also yes. Does it suck less than your average corporate system?
Actually, I think yes.  But these are the boring questions.

Are we doing as much as we can to make it suck less? I think we're
trying hard and doing alright. BarnCamp is a good shot at bridging a
whole lot of gaps and HacktionLab in general is great. I think that with
work, we steadily get better at bridging gaps and building capability.
Certainly the amount of skills available to our political movements are
way, way beyond what they were 5 years ago. HacktionLab has played a
role in that, along with some other initiatives.

At the same time, I am really interested in having discussions about
ways we can still improve things.  To succeed at what we're doing, we
need to have technical and less-technical people collaborating on
projects - can we ditch the original negativity of this discussion and
concentrate on talking about that for a bit?

At the risk of pissing everybody off further (NOT my intention), I'll
make the following formulation:

Un-geeks, or sub-geeks, or geeks-in-a-state-of-becoming: no uber-geek
gonna jump on you for the next ten messages to this list.  What kinds of
barriers do you feel when it comes to working with those of us who are
geekier than yourselves? How could BarnCamp have been better? How could
we help you get involved in our awesome super-geeky projects? Is there
anything we're not doing that we should be doing?

Greets,
Yossarian