LugRadio Live USA & Jono's Recent Talk

Registration for LugRadio Live USA is now open, and I hope that anyone reading will be able to make it. It's shaping up to be an awesome two day show in the beautiful city of San Francisco, in the heart of the Federal Republic of Northern California. Google's Open Source Team, and by Open Source Team I mean Cat Allman and our colleague Kynan Dent, has been hard at work to make this show a reality. Please be sure to thank them when you see them at the Metreon.

I had the pleasure of hosting Jono Bacon for a tech talk when he visited a few weeks back to do a space tour, and would highly recommend checking out his talk Standing on the Shoulders of Giants. He makes some great points towards the end of the presentation about the damage done to healthy communities by the "noisy minority." Speaking as someone who has dropped out of more than one project due to poor behavior on the part of a few vocal participants, his remarks really hit home and were a great off-shoot of the material Ben and Fitz cover in their Poisonous People talk.

All too often people tend to shy away from confronting folks who pontificate a great deal, contribute little or nothing, but damage the community by derailing consensus and creating quarrels where none ought to be. This needs to stop. If you find yourself or your project dealing with this issue, Ben and Fitz have some great advice to help you deal with the problem. My recommendation is to simply point out to said noisy minority that you believe that their opinions are not widely shared and that the point of your community is to achieve consensus around common goals as opposed to creating divisions. If you find your remarks only championed privately, you might just want to move on to a healthier project.

I'll get 'round to posting highlights from DrupalCon Boston 2008, including my truly awesome lunch today with the crew from the Free Software Foundation, tomorrow. Or possibly later.