What FOSS communities can look like from the outside

“I found this mailing list conversation snippet to be very
insightful, and wanted to share it.

“Scott: “Open to critique” isn’t quite the same as “responsive
to critique”. From an outside perspective, it seems that frequently
SugarLabs is just not listening to people who offer contrary
opinions. This is better than flaming them, but maybe not as good
as it could be. For an end-of-year report, I’d like to see
instances enumerated where SugarLabs actually internalized some
outside critique and responded in a positive way — some
concrete change made to the UI, or Sugar, or to process. That would
be more convincing that simply stating, “we are now open to
critique”.

“Bernie: We’re definitely intimidating to non-technical people.
At least, this is what I sensed at the Realness Summit. OLE also
seems to be doing a better job at connecting with educators. I’m
not completely sure what corrective actions should be. We might
need to do some work on the wiki, maybe add web forums, which
non-geeks tend to prefer…”

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