Friday, September 29, 2006

Future beach front property

Today I watched the "An Inconvenient Truth" film which was recommened to us at the foo camp preceeding Euro OSCon. Steve had already blogged about it shortly. While i enjoy the summer evenings at the end of september that I experienced this week, I think we are heading for very serious and even hard times. I would guess that we all will soon have to cut back on many areas of our compfortable lifes: less warm showers, more sweaters in winter, not keeping your computer on 24/7, no more car, no more flights. I have been thinking on where to move, given the delicate position that europe is in with its dependency on the gulf stream.

Incidently i also ran into this cool website today, which makes one consequence of global warming a little bit more realistic. If you are lucky your house in the middle of the city will be beach front property soon.

Yet another example of that positive crisis awareness is needed. Act today and we might just get a major global crisis. Don't act and we might get mass extinction.

Sunday, September 03, 2006

Light at the end of the tunnel!

This seems to be a happy day for Debian. It certainly gave me the warm fuzzies when I read people's reactions to the Slashdot item, the steering committee, Madduck's and Joeyh's reflections on how things can work and some comments on IRC. It pleased me enough to get some new bloging infrastructure going in order to be able to chipe in.

There definitely is hope for Debian and change for the better is possible (and actually happens), as seen in the improved climate on IRC.

As with every change for the better, there is need of "positive crisis awareness" in order to reflect on possible changes, build momentum to overcome the status quo and implement changes in order to improve the situation step by step.

Crisis awareness is the awareness that there is a problem that needs solving. In contrast to negative crisis awareness, where one is paralyzed and unable to act on the danger and basically rolls over and dies, positive crisis awareness motivates to initiate change in order to avoid the crash and burn point and turn it into an opportunity of improvement, perhaps.

And exactly this is what I see emerge more and more: People who are no longer satisfied with the current situation and formulate thoughts on how to achieve improvement. A year ago we saw this with the hostile climate on mailing lists and IRC, now people realize that Debian has a lack of leadership, and that this is actually a problem.

We are still not the welcoming and friendly project we ought to be, but we are less hostile already and people know in what direction they want to move in the future (the more friendly one, thankfully). People have realized that hostility and pissing contests are evil and not a sign of l33tness, as some might have thought some time ago. But a culture change is happening, and if we stay on top of the issue we have a very good chance to not only omit the negative, hostile things we used to do but also come up with actively inviting and friendly things we can do.

The same is happening now (on a lesser scale so far) with the leadership area. The great thing is that if Debian takes up its issues and continuously improves there is hardly a limit to its potential. Not the first and strongest, but be the most persistent and patient will win in the end. And if we have incentive and urge to change we might just manage to keep up a continuous improvement process.

I think *that* incentive is the greatest thing we have to thank Ubuntu for.