[Cialug] On Commonplaces

[Josh More]

As I am sure that many of you have observed that we have an issue in our community.  I think that we are at a point where much further discussion will be increasingly unproductive.  I'm going to talk a little bit about what I think is going on and address a few specific points of misunderstanding and then stop.  I will gladly entertain further discussion on the topic, but I would strongly suggest that such discussion either be at the upcoming meeting or on the IRC channel.  More on this at the end.

There is a concept in rhetoric called a "commonplace".  I've talked before about "working within a paradigm", referring mostly to the fact that when new sysadmins work on Linux, there is a tendency to do a ./configure; make; make install instead of leveraging the package management systems.  The problem that an admin faces is that when they step outside of the paradigm, the normal tools of keeping a system updated and properly functions begin to break down.

That's is what I think is going on here.  We all exist within this community as a commonplace.  In other words, we have many things in common and use them as shorthand to communicate with one another.  An overly simplistic example is our use of the term "distro" to mean "collection of packages coupled with a tuned kernel that is linked to a smaller community that helps build and maintain it".

However, we are all part of other communities.  In general, our similarities outweigh our differences.  In this particular instance, however, they did not.  Instead, we are having people posting messages to one another from within their own commonplaces of belief, legality, politics and I suspect, a bit of class difference is going on too.

A few points that I'd like to quickly made to, hopefully, bring us back to the same place.

1) As has been pointed out, the use of the hyphen in the word "g-dly" is common among some groups of people.  This is an attempt to not take the lord's name in vain, is a gesture of respect and expression of humbleness.  I do not not know Brian personally (I think), but I do not think that we have reason to believe otherwise.

2) The tendency mentioned in #1 has become less prevalent in mainstream Western culture.  In fact, the last time I know of it being generally common was in the 1800's, and you can see it in the literature of the Brontes and Jane Austen... the same time frame that gave us the shorthand of using punctuation for unprintable characters.  It is not a way to swear without swearing, it is a way to accurately report what someone said without offending Victorian sensibilities.  Today it means something else, but be aware that some cultures are more closely tied with the history than many of us are today.

3) There is a tendency among people of a certain bent to be more literal than others.  We could have a fascinating conversation about literacy rates in a culture and the advent of fundamentalism in that culture (ask me at a dinner sometime, it's really neat), but for our purposes, we should bear in mind that some people... statistically, half our number... are going to read words as they are written and respond thinking that the words mean exactly what the dictionary says they do.

4) There is a tendency among other people that read the connotations of words.  Certain words used in certain ways are going to elicit certain emotional reactions whether or not that was their intent.  We could derail at this point into a discussion of tone and how such metadiscussions can serve to silence minorities within groups.  However, for this post, suffice to say that people who have had those techniques used against them tend to react poorly to the perception of those techniques being used... whether or not it was the intent of the poster.

So here's the thing.  Most of us have been around the Internet for a long time, and we've seen all this before.  This is obviously a communication breakdown that is snowballing.  I am going to mention a few things from a geeky/techy sort of commonplace.  These points are not directed at any person in particular, so please do not take personal offense.  In fact, most of them are things that I've learned by making a fool of myself in situations just like this, so if you don't see yourself in the points below, just look for me.

a) In geek groups, some people have a desire to be perceived as important by others.  Often, this can lead to posturing.  In situations like this, that tendency can make it worse, so if you see that in yourself, please check it.

b) In geek groups, some people can see an obvious solution and push for it hard.  The fact is that any solution that seems obvious to us is likely because we are not grasping the entirety of the situation.  I think most of us have fallen into that trap before, so let's all try to keep one another from falling into it again.  If there were an easy fix to miscommunication, we'd have found it by now.  We're pretty smart people, after all.

c) When there is a discussion going across commonplaces, it is very easy to fall into the "us vs them" trap.  I am sure that some folks are looking at this as Christians vs Atheists or whatever.  The fact is that, aside from being disproportionately white(ish) males, we are a group of minorities.  However you draw the lines, there is way to identify oneself with a misunderstood group.  Let's try to remember that we are an "us" and that none of us deliberately wish to cause offense.

d) That said, some of us will accidentally cause offense.  In fact, I am sure that I am offending some of you now.  To those of you, I apologize.  I do not wish to offend anyone, I simply wish us to clear up the misunderstanding and move on.  If you find yourself causing offense, I would hope that you can also apologize, briefly explain what you think happened, and express a desire to clear up the misunderstanding.  (A recent study has shown that apologies are never as good as anyone expects them to be, so don't spent too much time or worry over that.)

e) Email is a tricky medium.  We skim it, we read things into it, and we react emotionally.  If you are writing quickly, slow down.  If you are writing from high emotion, wait.  If you are writing something that someone else might misunderstand, get a second pair of eyes.  I re-extend my offer from the weekend to serve as a check on such messages before they are posted... much in the same way that I serve as an intermediary with the recruitment postings.  I am sure that I am not the only one willing to do this.  Just ask someone.

f) Lastly, and due mostly to e), I would like to suggest that if people wish to continue to discuss this issue, we do it at dinner tomorrow night at the VUG, Wednesday next week at the LUG or in the #cialug channel on Freenode.  Realtime communication is a lot easier to debug and the sooner we can pull back to our commonplace the better off everyone will be.


Josh More | Senior Security Consultant - CISSP, GIAC-GSLC Gold, GIAC-GCIH
Alliance Technologies | www.AllianceTechnologies.net<http://www.AllianceTechnologies.net>
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