pcb-rnd knowledge pool

 

How not to contribute

contrib2 by Tibor 'Igor2' Palinkas on 2019-04-09

Tags: howto, contribution, rules, goals, project, strategy, vision, accept, refuse

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Abstract: What sort of contribution is not welcome in pcb-rnd community and why. What's the economy behind contributing, how you can very easily differentiate between valuable and invaluable attempts.

  There is a specific behavior pattern of anti-contribution that I've seen a lot on the mailing list (geda-user) of our predecessor (pcb). The simplified model of the setup is this:

Still, what U does is:

This behavior is not tolerated in the pcb-rnd community. After a few warnings, U gets suspended or banned.

Rationale

The economy of pcb-rnd is rather simple. There are two assets that make the project go forward: strategy and time invested. Strategy is decided by the lead developer (Igor2). Time is invested by a lot of people: developers, power users, users.

The project goes forward only if:

If you want to help the project, you need to contribute your time. - that is the only way to fulfil rule 1. To also comply with rule 2, it does matter how you spend your time: most of the contribution needs to be focused in the direction the project is going.

That means random strong opinions are not helping the project at all. As geda-user@ showed, quite the opposite happens: if there are only a few loud, but useless "insistors" (U above) appear, that easily can demotivate existing developers (D above) and the project dies.

What U must accept (and economy of contribution)

You can have an opinion about anything. You can share your opinion. But your opinion alone can be worthless. Everyone has them, anyone can have hundreds of opinions for free. Adding value to a project needs investment. An opinion that is not result of investment, is not adding to the project. What can make your opinion worth anything is a product of how much time you have invested in understanding/solving the problem before wording your opinion and how much it is in line with the project strategy.

Remember: if it took 15 seconds of reading/research to form your opinion, it will take 15 seconds for everyone else too to get to the same level, so it is probably not worth even typing an email about it. This is simple economy: you can't make invaluable opinions (that are available for free for anyone) valuable without investing (time) in it first. No investment means no value. No value means noise, just waste of your and our resources. By pressing a no-value opinion, you are not helping the project, but set it back by stealing resources from more useful things.

If you are U, and you keep insisting on something that is clearly against project strategy, and/or not backed up with investment (at least the minimum reasonable time understanding the problem first), you will get a few warnings and eventually get suspended or banned.

Notable exceptions

In a few rare occassions "time invested" can be substituted with something else that is not freely available for everyone immediatly. This is most often just a different form of time investment: resources that you have already invested in the past. Typical exampels:

  • the project needs some knowledge you already invested a lot of time learning, in the past (e.g. you know details of a non-trivial file format, you spent hundreds of hours implementing a few versions of something we are about to implement now so you can share how different designs will or will not work)
  • you have access to some exotic, not-cheaply-available-for-everyone device (e.g. you have a g-code capable router you can use for testing pcb-rnd exports with minimal time investment from your side)