@tromer Thanks for your thoughtful response. I greatly appreciate it, particularly when contrasted against a lot of the negativity in parts of the community.
I opened up on how I felt–as I mentioned, I almost didn’t speak up. For better or worse, engineers adopt a certain level of “thick skin” and retreat to GitHub where we can focus on facts, rather than feelings.
I trust that people are voicing their concerns in good faith (as opposed to sabotaging), precisely because they care.
Judging by outcomes, something surely is broken yet some approaches are more destructive than constructive. As a founding scientist, your statements reverberate and can be corrosive to community and morale if they are inaccurate or appear inflammatory.
I strongly agree that fixing communication is key but the burden is probably not all on ECC.
RE: ECC’s effective (non-)transparency
A few things stand out to me as I read and deeply think about your post:
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Resource constraint. From a Wallet Team perspective: We have one Android Developer. One iOS. One person who updates lightwalletd as HALF of their job. I’m not sure our team could be any smaller without people further taking on too many roles. And I won’t even get started on how much work @str4d does!
In contrast, 3 jobs ago, I worked on a coupon app that had 32 mobile devs. I know former coworkers on app teams with over 100 Android developers, alone.
On the other end of the spectrum, the average small team cannot spare the time to do technical design “by committee.” Instead, they are trusted with a high level of autonomy, especially when it comes to complex technical decisions and complex trade-offs. -
Trust. Does the community really trust ECC and vice-versa? It’s risky to wade into the forums without a “Hazmat suit” because we’re all mired in a vicious cycle of distrust. Thankfully, everyone wants to fix this (modulo the occasional troll).
So lets continue to work to repair the trust wounds. -
Negativity is a communicable disease. Toxicity in the forums is disproportionately spread like wildfire. Out of frustration, when those in position of influence make fairly imprecise assertions like, “ECC … no longer communicates the details of what it’s doing,” it gets amplified into other contentious threads and I’m not convinced that process is constructive. That post lead me here.
On a personal note: I was a bit offended by this, in the moment, because I was awake past midnight on a Saturday collecting information from the forum so I could put it into a newsletter that I’m releasing Monday to explicitly communicate technical details for Light Clients. This will be my 7th such article. Yet two of my favorite scientists are taking actions that might do more to contribute to toxicity than to neutralize it. -
Help not harm. How can the “outside community” be a part of the solution? Ignoring that the plans were on display analogy probably disparages or at least trivializes the hefty efforts we do make, who can help us retrieve the content from that “filing cabinet in the lavatory” (given that we seem to agree it exists, publicly)?
Could more of the roughly $15 million of ZF funds be put toward this reoccuring problem? Can ZOMG fund a team that specializes in technical communication to lend a hand?
Perhaps we could try to use this interesting tool as the one source of truth?
Let’s get to a healthier place. I think that requires a concerted effort to improve communication not just from ECC but in all directions.