[Wylug-discuss] 'Pathetic' FLOSS Advocacy - Put it to the test?

[Dave Fisher]

On Wed, Jan 24, 2007 at 11:40:34PM +0000, Mark P. Conmy wrote:
> Don't get annoyed or upset.  Dave's just donned his flame-retardant
> underwear to provoke a reaction. ;-)

Looks like it worked ;-)

> I do think that there is a place for lobbying in with the support and
> advocacy, but I'm not sure that I agree with some of the assumptions
> made regarding the response to such discussions.  I wouldn't report to
> WYLUG (or anyone else) when I'd written to lobby on an issue already
> discussed even if (as in this case) I feel strongly about it.  That
> doesn't mean I didn't write.

I thought that I'd been pretty careful to avoid saying that people
*should* inform on themselves to the WYLUG STASI ;-)

Indeed, I tried to frame the piece as a kind of thought experiment about
what a group might do to test whether it was really serious about
campaigning. 

Which is one reason why I talked about 'reported' (rather than verified)
action, allowing that people might remain uninvolved, stay silent or
even 'fib'. Another reason is that hypothesis-falsification is a
methodology which focuses on 'reliability' or 'replicability'.  It has
has little, if anything, to say about 'validity'.

In this respect, my propaganda point was that *if* people want WYLUG to
campaign on a topic, they should treat it like a proper campaign.

Every successful campaign that I've joined or studied (including
very short-term protests like the petrol duty farago), has involved a
active team of people who were prepared to take on specific roles which
they were willing to take responsibility for fulfulling.

In most cases this requires considerably tighter integration than one
finds in a typical open source development project ... although not
necessarily much more than you find in the most successful FLOSS
projects ;-)

Dave