the community is divided in team xonotic & the rest

hi,

some quotes:

This Xonotic planning forum will be purely for informational purposes where Team Xonotic will reveal some details of our internal discussions, thus allowing us to increase transparency with the rest of the community.

Here, we will post bullet points from our discussions

We don't want community members creating "Xonotic" accounts for us. We would prefer to do that ourselves.

We are going to change some weapon names in Xonotic.At this point, we're not sure exactly which weapon names will change. It depends on how many good ideas are brought up.

vs

Are you happy with simply inheriting the gun as is from Nexuiz? Im not to hot on the idea, heres my suggestion. Id love to hear your ideas too!

the information of the second quote is the same, but the way it is written has a completely different effect on the reader. the first quote says "team xonotic want new names, you are allowed to make suggestions". the second quote says "i'm not so happy and suggest the following. what do you think?"



also check out these threads:
http://forums.xonotic.org//showthread.php?tid=232
http://forums.xonotic.org//showthread.php?tid=256
http://forums.xonotic.org//showthread.php?tid=231
http://forums.xonotic.org//showthread.php?tid=234
http://forums.xonotic.org//showthread.php?tid=236

right, they are all closed (at least for me ), and iirc they all had names which said "i'm a internal discussion".

internal disussions.... come on, that must be a joke. are you sure that you want to exclude the community from anything in a community-driven project? internal discussions don't make any sense. whats their advantage over a closed thread with a comment thread?

this "team xonotic", "we made this decision", "in a discussion you couldn't participate", "we want to.....with the community" worries me.


to be honest, i don't know what i want to achieve with this thread. maybe i just want to share my thoughts with the community (which means all of you). please write your opinion about.... this


jaykay

I'm already tired of this kind of posts...

wheres the rest of "this kind of posts"?

I agree with the sentiment. Lots of marketing speak and division of the community into those who are "in" and those who are "not in" is like poison in an open source project. Let's avoid that.

Don't care about hidden threads, though. I have full confidence in each of the forum admins and moderators, and as far as I know all development discussions take place publicly on IRC and the dev tracker. I don't feel like I'm missing out on anything. But if you do, why aren't you on IRC already.

I am totally fine with the way the Xonotic project has progressed so far.
Admins, moderators and official development team are all awesome people who who spend SO MUCH time and effort here.
You need to get on to IRC and get an idea of what is happening, because you plainly don't have one at the moment.

please don't get me wrong, i didn't want to offend any of the developers or despise (i don't know if this is the right word) their efforts.

about irc... maybe you're right and i should follow the discussions there, but i did complain about "internal discussions". which are probably not in #xonotic.

btw logging the irc might be a good idea, so everyone can see the irc discussions.

The hidden threads always make me curious especially if they are something I'd like to contribute to. Still, I have full confidence in the team and I think they are aiming to do whats best for Xonotic.

They can't listen to everyone screaming ideas at them at once or we'd end up with a game more reminiscent of Frankenstein's monster thats just been run over by a truck.

shit happens

also good stuff.

Frankenstein's monster was the main character in a bunch of movies and was co-starring in several others. (even had dedicated books and songs and whatnot)

On topic, i think it's true and obvious that the community is divided, but that's perfectly fine. Some just want to play. Few actually register on the forums.

I wouldn't be surprised if the team tried to take in less feedback from the community for the first version. If they kept listening to everyone's suggestions/demands/complaints etc all the time, we'd never have a first version

who is 'the team'? i think thats the question

I wouldn't be surprised if the team tried to take in less feedback from the community for the first version. If they kept listening to everyone's suggestions/demands/complaints etc all the time, we'd never have a first version

I totally agree with you. The most important thing for xonotic is to make a release to let the servers to replace the old nexuiz.

you're right. lets wait until things settle down and until we have a release i'll think about worrying after that

The concerns with closed door planning has been brought up to us by various people, but it's always based on a speculation, misunderstanding, a lot of impatience, and a sprinkle of paranoia. I understand the basic concern, but the accusation itself is not justified.

So here are some things I want to point out in response to the accusation:

1) I am outlining the next News post for the Xonotic.org site which covers this topic and gives more clarity on what we have been doing in our planning discussions lately. Of course, posting this next news entry is delayed because I'm waiting on some further discussions to be ironed out. I don't want to post the wrong information.

2) Not only is there no fire, but there is also no smoke. JayKay mentioned the internal planning forum, but said nothing about the public planning forum, where we had planned to provide some bullet points on our discussions and allow community members to comment on those threads. The point of that forum was to create transparency for our internal planning discussions. We haven't created anything in the public planning forum yet because there is even debate on whether that is going to work. The whole point of our internal planning forum was to have a way for us to do our discussions in a better way than IRC, which is how we did all of our previous planning leading up to the Xonotic announcement.

3) I don't think you realize how early we are in our decision making process with this project. We're still figuring out how we are getting started. We just announced it a few weeks ago. I understand that everyone is excited for Xonotic, but I think some people expected the game to be released the day after our announcement. We aren't even done planning the internal structure of the management yet... which, by the way, is exactly the main reason we forked from Nexuiz in the first place. Nexuiz didn't have management structure. That lack of structure allowed the project to be mismanaged. You should be happy that we're placing so much focus on this for Xonotic. This step is vital.

4) For a community project, which Xonotic is, we can put mechanisms into place to allow community members to discuss and contribute ideas into the decision making process... but that is not a simple feat. Even with those mechanisms in place, there is still going to be oversight by people who manage certain areas of the project.

5) With any new project, there has to be some planning discussions to get the "base" parts of the project nailed down. Part of these "internal" discussions involve that very topic. We're not even 100% clear yet on how decisions are made. That is 90% of what we're working out in our "internal" discussions.

6) There is an upside to a dictatorship. Under a dictatorship, decisions are made quickly. But with a group of 7 people with varying viewpoints making decisions, the process can happen slowly, especially if the decisions are important ones that affect the project as a whole.

7) When our decisions on team structure are completed, our decision-making structure will be setup to incorporate community input.

8) Though nothing is set in stone, so far, we're giving more weight to contributors than to non-contributing community members. Open source projects are driven by contributors (mappers, modelers, artists, developers, musicians, server admins). Naturally, contributor input is going to be more important to the project. We will, of course, also incorporate common community (player) input as well. We're discussing forming groups of contributors where many decisions (perhaps most) will be made within those groups, if that topic falls within that group's area of focus (programming topics are decided by programmers, artistic stuff decided by artists, etc). There is, of course, overlap to be considered, where a group decision might affect other parts of the game, or affect the game in general to a large degree. Depending on the topic, we may utilize community polls to get feedback.

9) You're missing information. I understand that can be an uncomfortable thing, to be left in the dark. The reason we are keeping our initial conversations private is because it would be detrimental to unveil all of these chats we are having. It would simply create more distraction for the process and we wouldn't be able to get this project off the ground if we did that. We got a lot more discussion done before our announcement than afterward. Since our announcement, we are getting pulled in all directions by questions and suggestions and various topics unrelated to project organization, and we of course have to also deal with accusations such as those in this thread. It is unfortunate that we wern't able to get all of the "base" decisions completed before our announcement. Time was a factor. We were in somewhat of a rush to get the announcement out since people were freaking out over the Nexuiz deal.

10) The "core group" of 7 members is a mixed group. There are a lot of things we don't agree on. There is a lot of skepticism already within this group on ideas and suggestions. Every discussion we have involves parsing it for corruption/mismanagement. Anyone on a management team for any project has to have some self-checks in place to make sure there aren't selfish motives, or lack of consideration for people that those decisions affect. I think we have a lot of those self-checks. In fact, those self-checks are part of why our discussions are taking so long. Every time we take a step in some direction, there is scrutiny over whether that's appropriate for an open source project, or whether it is responsible for the community at-large. If you want to know things are taking so long, there is your answer.

wow, many thanks.

please focus on 0.9 and 1.0. you are allowed to ignore the community until that but please try to reach 100% transparency after things... well, settled down.

I understand your concerns jaykay, and a share quite a few of them. atm at least the tone is, as you describe, a bit to much "us and them". theres really no need or purpose in this; as said above in this thread of course every single idea cant be considered and evaluated or a release will never happen. but the two aren't related. one is a question of attitude, the other a question of management.

Im not content with this separation (be it real or perceived) rest assured tough that as a member of this "core team" i will work towards eliminating it.

i now realize that this was the point of my first post it was the tone i was worried about.

but after dokujisans post i think it doesn't matter since 1.0 is more important

A relevant link from the Arch newsletter:

http://www.archlinux.org/static/magazine...ontributed

(I say the following having contributed nothing technical to the Xonotic project as of yet) I think that Dokujisan's 8th point is the most important, and that people who put nil into the project should not have as much control over it's direction as developers and contributors.

I can very much see how a dictatorship (providing it's properly self regulated) could be beneficial to the direction of the project.

The idea of a cooperative anarchy, although not as suitable, does have a certain ring to it

Thx, Dokujisan, for taking your time to elaborate. I myself am not worried at all, actually after your post I am even more confident the project management is in the right hands. Transparency is important, and I am happy to see that this is realized.

You contribute to the project with ideas (small contribution), writting code (big contribution), creating new resources like models and maps (big contribution).

My strategy is just to ignore that theres something called xonotic team. If you can contribute with code, models, and maps, GO FOR IT, you can always create these things and publish the model/patch/map. My opinion is that the xenotic team is A organization system, but not THE organization system. More groups can be created for some goals. Like, I don't know.. a mapper group, a sysadmin group, and things.

And about ideas. The ideas that I think are more important, are these that cross borders. Wen a mapper ask a programmer a feature he want, he will use that will make the game much more amazing. Or wen a programmer ask a mapper to make a map with a particular feature. Or a modeler ask a programer about what the programmers think about attaching particle efect such and such to vertex, and things like that.

Can I just chip-in here and say this: What a breath of fresh air it is to hear Dokujisan and tZork's responses to a valid question that could so easily be perceived as inflammatory.

I've been there at the start of other F/LOSS fork projects where these issues have had to be resolved and I've see them not so directly addressed and a nasty taste left in the mouths of some community members. It always surprises me (and I suspect project developers) how much "community management" is required to run a successful open-source project!

Good show, fellers! :o)

You contribute to the project with ideas (small contribution), writting code (big contribution), creating new resources like models and maps (big contribution).

True. We haven't said we won't value equal all contribution, let that be an idea or something you can see/hear.

My strategy is just to ignore that theres something called xonotic team.

That means your contribution would probably never get into an official release, or it'll have a hard time. Another problem we want to eliminate from Nexuiz: no mish-mash maps, sounds, models, that doesn't share the same standards. Also, development goes on the dev tracker. That means, if you develop for the game itself, you have to obey the leaders, if they say stop it, or change something. While I'm sure it won't be a strickt, dictatoric act, but ORGANISED development means sometimes you have to do things you just don't want to by yourself. I've accepted this, because I know my voice will be heared, if I have something against the decision of the leadership, and we both will try to reach an agreement.

And about ideas. The ideas that I think are more important, are these that cross borders. Wen a mapper ask a programmer a feature he want, he will use that will make the game much more amazing. Or wen a programmer ask a mapper to make a map with a particular feature. Or a modeler ask a programer about what the programmers think about attaching particle efect such and such to vertex, and things like that.

This is just the thing we all try to accomplish, but this requires organised development.

The idea of a cooperative anarchy, although not as suitable, does have a certain ring to it ;)

Hehe yes that it does =)

@C.Brutail: i think what Tei is saying is this: The Team Xonotic and all it means will have zero effect on anyone who just wants to mess abt with a map some some code/mod but not necessarily partake in the "official" development. This is of course true, we have no wish or ability to dictate over anything that does not have a direct impact on the project itself.

C.Brutail has a good point here tough: content created this was may well stray to far off the beaten path for inclusion in the official package. If your goal IS to get "it" included some day you will do well to speak to "the team" abt it.

@Tei: the sort of groups you speak of are getting "organizers" selected for them as we speak. The function of those ppl will be, among things, to aid others interested in the group topic.

@edam: Good to know that our efforts are paying off, we really do not want to come off as uncommunicative, alienating or elitist. As Dokujisan explained its just a lot of things to be handled now (probably more then any of us realized at first ;)

As addendum to my previous post: I do NOT think theres a accentual intent or will for a "us and them" separation with Team Xonotic. However reading some of the statements on this site makes it seem that way to me (and apparently im not alone in this paranoia ;)

By "these kind of threads" I meant the threads where people freak out. Nexuiz was sold out but this is Xonotic, a whole 'nother thing. Have some faith in the developers, after all, they are the ones that get their hands dirty.

Put the past behind and be more optimistic.