November 4th, 2008
Staying on topic: Using community channels for political conversations?
As election day nears, it’s not surprising that people’s thoughts — and their blog posts and comments on mailing lists — turn to politics. The question is what’s appropriate for discussion, and where? And should tech businesses stay out of politics altogether?
This has come up in a lot of places — I’ve noticed an uptick in political comments on Twitter, open source blogs, and (of course) mailing lists. Tim O’Reilly has been taking some criticism for his commentaries recently, but decided that it’s worth the risk:
Frankly, I’d rather see more companies wearing their opinions on their sleeves rather than expressing them with quiet campaign contributions and inside conversations. Part of what I love about the net is how it encourages openness and dialogue.
The flip side of that, of course, is that it also makes it really easy to spark heated arguments that divide community. I think it’s fine for people like O’Reilly to blog about their opinions on politics, the economy, or their navel lint if they’re so inclined — O’Reilly’s worked hard to get where he is and to build an audience. It’s his call on what he says to that audience (and their call to decide whether to stick around or not…).
But for mailing lists and other channels that are used to do project work, going off-topic should be done rarely, if at all. When we launched the lizards.opensuse.org group blog for openSUSE members to talk about the work they’re doing, some of the developers expressed concern that they’d be inundated with off-topic discussions and lolcat pictures. Having to work in a chat room filled with off-topic discussions can get pretty old very quickly as well. While each person may only contribute a little off-topic messaging, the aggregate effect is that the noise overwhelms the signal in no time flat.
Off-topic discussions that cause friction and distraction should be avoided — or, if you have a really chatty community — make available and off-topic list for chatter and try to restrict those conversations to the off-topic lists.
What do you think? Should we fire off our opinions no matter what the forum, or does medium dictate the message?
Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier is a longtime FOSS advocate, and currently works for Novell as the community manager for openSUSE. Prior to joining Novell, Brockmeier worked as a technology journalist covering the open source beat for a number of publications, including Linux Magazine, Linux Weekly News, Linux.com, UnixReview.com, IBM developerWorks, and many others. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations. Follow Zonker on Twitter.
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