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SoylentNews is people

posted by mattie_p on Thursday March 06 2014, @02:35AM   Printer-friendly
from the not-kim-jung-un dept.

I can no longer sustain the level of activity needed to run SoylentNews, and so I have resigned as leader.

In the end, I was literally begging people to step back and let the site "just run" for a few days while I caught up... alas, to no effect. Issues must be resolved "right here and right now" continuously throughout my day with no end in sight.

NCommander has taken over as project lead - he has access to everything from the registrar down. I understand he has a different vision for the project, which will soon be revealed.

I'm sorry to leave like this, but there's really nothing for it. I'm going back to my AI studies, which happen at a more leisurely pace.

John Barrabas

(And yes, this was an amicable transfer of power. There's no hard feelings on my side.)

[Ed. Note: this is a word for word article based on Barrabas's journal entry.]

 
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  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by fleg on Thursday March 06 2014, @02:53AM

    by fleg (128) Subscriber Badge on Thursday March 06 2014, @02:53AM (#11681)

    "Issues must be resolved "right here and right now" continuously throughout my day with no end in sight."

    examples, of these issues, would be interesting.

    were they of the form "if this doesnt happen now, the site goes down"?

    or more like "so which colour is it? red or green!"?

    and also, thanks for getting things this far.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 06 2014, @03:11AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 06 2014, @03:11AM (#11696)

    People have jobs, maybe school, children, other responsibilities.

  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by ancientt on Thursday March 06 2014, @03:53AM

    by ancientt (40) <ancientt@yahoo.com> on Thursday March 06 2014, @03:53AM (#11724) Homepage Journal

    There is a chance that the parent comment could be construed to mean "I question whether this decision was justified" but I think we all respect how much effort, passion and time John has poured into this project. I absolutely trust that he put a lot of thought into this decision and I think we can all respect what he has done. I think we can also still hope that it doesn't need to happen again. Kudos to John for being able to handle this transition smoothly without demanding his ball and just going home.

    Earlier today I had typed a comment into my IRC client but decided not to post it to the room in the end, but perhaps this is the place and now is the appropriate time to share it.

    Delegation of work is critical to a project of this size. There are so many people who have input and needs, I think it may be too much to handle even for a dozen project leads. I propose that delegation be pushed further down to teams. I would like to see teams created by each of the project leads so that groups of 10 to 30 people have a place to contribute input for discussion and that each team leader submit no more than a couple of recommendations per day. We can have teams reporting to teams if necessary so that the project leaders at the top only get a few well thought out things to work on at a time.

    I'd be happy to be on a team that reports to a team that reports to the team that reports to the lead developers. That would put me at a level with 1,000 to 27,000 other people who are coming up with 30 or so discussion points per day. Those results could then be limited to maybe 3 suggestions per lead developer per day. If that's still too much, add another level so that we have 270,000 potential contributors who are resulting in only a few issues for the lead developers per day.

    1. Lead - 3 ideas to discuss per day (Say 10 people)
    2. Alpha team - invite only team created by each lead developer (100 people, 10 groups, each reporting to one lead)
    3. Beta teams - invite only by Alpha team members (1000 people in 100 more teams, each reporting to one Alpha)
    4. Gamma teams - invite only teams by Beta members (10,000 people, 1000 teams each reporting to a Beta
    5. Delta teams - open to anyone to join where teams aren't full (100,000 people, 10,000 teams reporting to Gammas)

    That accounts for 111,110 contributors resulting in 3 ideas per lead developer per day. Maybe we don't need that many layers, maybe we need more. I'm just trying to get the idea out there for a way to give everyone a place for input without overwhelming the people doing the critical work.

    If it would be a better system than IRC, I'd also be open to checking in on team1411.soylentnews.org to participate in the discussions of my particular team in the format we all came here for.

    If we need the developers to have more time to work on each idea, then let them solicit two apprentices each to assign work to. I'm not really picky about exactly how the work gets filtered or who handles the decisions, I just hope that we can find methods of making progress at a pace the people doing the work are comfortable handling.

    --
    This post brought to you by Database Barbie
    • (Score: 1) by fleg on Thursday March 06 2014, @04:24AM

      by fleg (128) Subscriber Badge on Thursday March 06 2014, @04:24AM (#11740)

      "There is a chance that the parent comment could be construed to mean "I question whether this decision was justified""

      just to be clear then, that was not at all my intention.

      just curious as to what the issues were.

    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 06 2014, @04:58AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 06 2014, @04:58AM (#11757)

      Great idea. Straight out of history.

      Exodus 18:14 - 26 And when Moses' father in law saw all that he did to the people, he said, What is this thing that thou doest to the people? why sittest thou thyself alone, and all the people stand by thee from morning unto even? And Moses said unto his father in law, Because the people come unto me to enquire of God: When they have a matter, they come unto me; and I judge between one and another, and I do make them know the statutes of God, and his laws. And Moses' father in law said unto him, The thing that thou doest is not good. Thou wilt surely wear away, both thou, and this people that is with thee: for this thing is too heavy for thee; thou art not able to perform it thyself alone. Hearken now unto my voice, I will give thee counsel, and God shall be with thee: Be thou for the people to God-ward, that thou mayest bring the causes unto God: And thou shalt teach them ordinances and laws, and shalt shew them the way wherein they must walk, and the work that they must do. Moreover thou shalt provide out of all the people able men, such as fear God, men of truth, hating covetousness; and place such over them, to be rulers of thousands, and rulers of hundreds, rulers of fifties, and rulers of tens: And let them judge the people at all seasons: and it shall be, that every great matter they shall bring unto thee, but every small matter they shall judge: so shall it be easier for thyself, and they shall bear the burden with thee. If thou shalt do this thing, and God command thee so, then thou shalt be able to endure, and all this people shall also go to their place in peace. So Moses hearkened to the voice of his father in law, and did all that he had said. And Moses chose able men out of all Israel, and made them heads over the people, rulers of thousands, rulers of hundreds, rulers of fifties, and rulers of tens. And they judged the people at all seasons: the hard causes they brought unto Moses, but every small matter they judged themselves.

      I feel confident this comment will not be taken well, but the idea is a good one.

      • (Score: 3, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Thursday March 06 2014, @07:33AM

        by maxwell demon (1608) on Thursday March 06 2014, @07:33AM (#11817) Journal

        I feel confident this comment will not be taken well

        Why? Just because it quotes the bible? Note that the quoted text does not even claim the idea being coming from god, but from Moses' father in law. So yes, independent of what you think of the bible or religion, the text documents that people had that idea already in ancient times (I think there's no question that the bible texts are old), because someone must have had the idea back then, or it could not have been written down.

        --
        The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by gringer on Thursday March 06 2014, @06:31AM

      by gringer (962) on Thursday March 06 2014, @06:31AM (#11792)

      A social news website doesn't need 100,000 people for the day-to-day running and operation.

      --
      Ask me about Sequencing DNA in front of Linus Torvalds [youtube.com]
      • (Score: 1) by ancientt on Thursday March 06 2014, @05:32PM

        by ancientt (40) <ancientt@yahoo.com> on Thursday March 06 2014, @05:32PM (#12065) Homepage Journal

        It certainly doesn't, but if you have 100,000 people trying to contribute everyday, and you care about their opinions then you need to have a way to give them a place to be listened to. Hopefully it doesn't take measures as exaggerated as what I described, but I wanted to describe something that could handle even that level of input.

        --
        This post brought to you by Database Barbie
    • (Score: 2, Informative) by gottabeme on Thursday March 06 2014, @04:01PM

      by gottabeme (1531) on Thursday March 06 2014, @04:01PM (#12005)

      SN doesn't need more ideas. It needs time for people with the know-how to do their thing.

      What do we need ideas for? We have Slashcode. We have stories. We have comments. We have a long list of minor improvements to make.

      We certainly don't need a 5-level pyramid with 111,110 people submitting ideas. Good grief.

      We don't need more ideas! What we need is for people to stop sending ideas and just shut up and use the site!

      • (Score: 1) by ancientt on Thursday March 06 2014, @05:47PM

        by ancientt (40) <ancientt@yahoo.com> on Thursday March 06 2014, @05:47PM (#12076) Homepage Journal

        Whether SN needs more ideas or not, it has them and along with demands from people who want to be listened to.

        We do need ideas though, ideas about how to fix the issues that necessarily come with the level of use it is already seeing. Ideas about how to fix dependencies on Mod_Perl for example or how to modify the code to allow customized styles without breaking the existing preferences. Maybe they don't need them at this particular moment, and maybe some of them aren't best addressed by the developers doing the work right now, but that's kind of the point. There are ways to give people a way to contribute successfully to something they care about without getting in the way.

        I certainly doubt that we need a 5 level pyramid, but using an exaggerated example sometimes makes it easy to see a benefit when the real numbers aren't handy.

        Like it or not, this site wasn't created to serve an audience. It is all about interactive discussion and with the community that has formed around it comes the problem of giving that community the outlet for discussion they crave, even if it means doing something a little differently than traditional sites have done. After all, that's kind of the point.

        --
        This post brought to you by Database Barbie
  • (Score: 1) by neagix on Thursday March 06 2014, @06:46AM

    by neagix (25) on Thursday March 06 2014, @06:46AM (#11801)
    Good point.

    In the beginning I was proposing to use a tracker for project-level issues; although more paperwork would be needed to get stuff done, the benefit is that as a project manager one can set priorities, group them by their dependencies and milestones and have a better peace of mind at tracking the status of them.

    Any tool can be abused, but without tools like this - this is what you get!
    I am really sorry to see Barrabas go, I hope he will join back in due time