Ditto regarding an apology, but I can't help but think of the line, "I'd
explain it to you, but your head would explode."

​peace, y'all.

John Lolis
Coordinator of Computer Systems
White Plains Public Library
100 Martine Avenue
White Plains, NY  10601

tel: 1.914.422.1497
fax: 1.914.422.1452

http://whiteplainslibrary.org/


On Mon, Mar 21, 2016 at 4:18 PM, Cary Gordon <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> I apologize for not taking this off list quite yet.
>
> The last post had me both laughing and crying, and I believe that you are
> quite accurate in your characterization of many open-source projects.
>
> It reminded me of my freshman “honors” calculus class, which was taught by
> by a full professor with the social skills of an anteater. The book was a
> grad-level calculus review translated word-by-word from French with not
> even the slightest acknowledgement of the concept of grammar in either
> language. One day, my friend went to see the prof to ask for an explanation
> of one of his incomprehensible lectures. He replied by stating that “If you
> can’t understand it, I can’t see how I can help you!” Not unsurprisingly,
> everyone who had taken calc in high school got a B in the class, and
> everyone else from this group who had probably carried close to 4.0
> averages in high school got a D.
>
> In that case, I believe the prof was simply trying to get the message to
> his bosses that he hated teaching. I don’t think that the issues with some
> open-source projects are far off of this.
>
> While there are certainly folks in the “If you can’t understand it, I
> can’t see how I can help you!”/“Cary, you ignorant fool" class, my
> experience is that there are many folks in the open-source community — even
> ones who work on projects with less-than-helpful documentation — who will
> go to great lengths to help folks get on track. I know that I have been the
> recipient of such help on many occasions, and that my asking for help has
> occasionally led to improvements in their misleading or incomplete
> documentation.
>
>
> > On Mar 21, 2016, at 12:33 PM, Julie Swierczek <
> [log in to unmask]> wrote:
> >
> > Just to clarify: I wasn't talking about this list only.  I am
> particularly interested in lists related to libraries/archives/museums and
> technology, but I am also interested in hearing other examples, and about
> how we have interpreted those examples.  (Tell me a story about it!)  I
> think that one of the things I'll present or write about are cases where it
> is not necessarily obvious that a person is belittled by a response.   That
> is, in reply to a question, a responder says one thing, but what the
> original questioner heard was "you are too stupid to play with us".
> >
> > Some obvious flame wars involve accusations of stupidity, but I am
> especially interested in the much more subtle cases where readers might
> feel stupid even if that is not the author's intent.
> >
> > One example that comes to mind is when a group announces that they are
> releasing a new open source project for institutions of "all sizes" to make
> it easier for libraries to do this fabulous thing.  So Person X, who is not
> completely inept with computers, goes to the project site and the
> instructions are something like this:
> >
> > 1. We are not going to tell you which server architecture this works on
> because you clearly should be smart enough to figure that out.
> > 2. Download this package.
> > 3. Compile the package.
> > 4. Obviously there are 300 dependencies, but we are not going to tell
> you what they are. Any decent institution would have them installed already.
> > 5. Change system configurations to serve local needs.  We're not going
> to tell you what that means or how to do it.
> > 6. Use the API from your ILS to feed in this data. If your current API
> doesn't work, please write one according to the specs on some other project
> you've never heard of.  Note that the documentation of that other project
> hasn't been updated in eleven years, but you'll figure it out. What? Your
> library catalog doesn't have an API?!?!?!  You must be joking.  *Everyone*
> has an API.
> > 7. Earn a PhD in computer science.
> > 8. Change your entire server environment including reinstalling your ILS
> on some other platform, breaking everything and requiring tens of thousands
> of dollars in development work to put all the pieces back together again.
> > 9. Type the following commands in the command line.  Note that they look
> like a SHA-256 hash, but they are actually really simple commands that
> everyone should know.
> > 10. Voila!  it works.
> > addendum: We did not include any help instructions. You can just read
> the code if you need to figure something out.
> >
> > The group offering the program probably does not intend for their
> directions to come across this way, but that is what sometimes happens, and
> Person X now feels like an idiot and doesn't want to participate anymore.
> >
> > So, I am looking for something more subtle here than the obvious
> mudslinging you can find in most tech forums.  As to the question of
> whether that happens here or not, I would generally say no, except that I -
> and most likely all readers here - have not read every single message of
> the list archives, word for word, so something could have passed our
> notice.  There have most likely been multiple instances where someone asked
> a question in a way that would indicate that the person is new at this, and
> the answer was much more technically sophisticated than the level of the
> question. I am sure examples abound.
> >
> > I don't want to take up more space on the list talking about this, so
> please feel free to contact me off-list at [log in to unmask]
> Thank you.
> >
> > Julie
>