This is a letter to anyone who feels that the “Central Sakai People” – Chuck, Glenn and Lance as examples – are roadblocks to progress – and those people who keep harping on this in public and private mail.
I wrote this a few weeks back and then left it in drafts – to let myself cool down and and re-read this before blogging.
Usually the mail goes something like this: You central people are such a bunch of roadblocks – could you do X for me?

You have this all backwards. The “Roadblock People” have no desire to review all of the patches and there are hundreds of patches that go in without any review at all.
The problem is that there is that no one else is competent to review patches to the deepest parts of the system. The community is *not* well served at all just opening the gates of patches to the deep parts of the code. Then we will end up with crap – and then someone will still have to dig through and figure out why production servers are crashing or losing data – guess who will dig in and fix things – the Roadblock People – guess who will be blamed while Sakai is broken – not you – the Roadblock People. Because no one else will stand up to the task of taking responsibility for code in good times and bad – we depend on the RoadBlock People.
So until someone gets to the point where they have the skill and commitment to insure long-term quality of the code we wisely use the precious people resources that we have. Sadly at that point they “join” the Roadblock people and start throwing up roadblocks – so that we ship clean code in their areas of responbsibility. The reward for becoming a RoadBlock person? You guessed it – getting accused of being a roadblock while working 12 hour days and over the weekend.
There are hundreds of little things in each release – not just the things you want. Look at the SVN logs. New tools always have rough edges – guess who cleans them up – hmmm. the Roadblock people. Surprisingly no one else from the community feels the need to go through every new element of code and check for little errors. So the roadblock people 12 hour days for the two weeks after code freeze so the release is not garbage.
Where is the rest of the community here? I will tell you – sending email messages about how broken things are and how their *particular* thing is not getting attention because the whole project is screwed up or complaining about how one or another procedure was bent – but not *doing* the work.
When you (the person making the roadblock accusation) are willing to give me 30 hours of each of your weeks to work on tasks that I assign to you – let me know. I am sure that you will say (and rightly so) that you are too busy. I accept that explanation. With that why is it so hard for you to accept the explanation that other people are busy too? You can claim busy – but no one else can? Is that your rule?
Always couching conversations with something negative – “the process is broken – I need X” – this is unprofessional and not respectful of the dedication and commitment of the other members of the community and their commitment to the common good – being attacked continuously wears on people – everyone shoud find more positive ways to express what they need.
You have enough credibility in this community that when you say you need something – we do listen.
I so greatly value your skills talent and contribution that it feels weird sending even a mildly negative message to you. But you just keep resorting to the negative in your approach. The negativism is damaging and it is *not* necessary. Shrouding everything in a cloud of negativism is more likely to slow things down over time rather than speed them up. It is OK to remind folks when things seem to slip through the cracks – just don’t add the “zinger” about how broken everything is.
I have this zinger problem as well. I send a message that is 90% logical and on point – and then I add a “zinger” – something negative that causes my whole message to be ignored. When I do it – friends help me by pointing it out.
I hope that I re-read this message several times to eliminate any zingers :)