observations on OSAF communications

Dear fellow readers who do not work for OSAF:

I have some observations about my own behavior which might explain 
why OSAF has been so quiet.

I remember being very frustrated for several months at how little 
information trickled out of OSAF.  It almost seemed like they were 
deliberately operating in "stealth mode", like they were trying to 
hide something.

And why were they squandering the good will of people who eagerly 
wanted to help?  In particular, why didn't they just get a wiki up 
and let us go?  I was frustrated.

Then I was allowed to do some work on the wiki for OSAF.  To my 
surprise, the minute my foot was in the door -- never mind that it 
was only two millimeters inside -- I discovered a radical shift in my 
own thinking.  Suddenly, I didn't want to say *anything* about the 
wiki publicly, as I Do Not Speak For OSAF.  I imagined that I could 
phrase something badly, have people misunderstand, cause a big 
brouhaha, get called on the carpet both inside and outside OSAF, and 
have to slink away in shame.  As this is an important project to me, 
I didn't want to run that risk.

Part of why saying anything is scary for me is that I believe there 
are scores of hungry people hovering outside the door, just waiting 
to pounce upon any scrap of information that escapes.  I imagine that 
if I say, "OSAF really likes the Grape feature in XYZ Corp's calendar 
application, that there will be a stampede of activity: VCs will race 
to cancel funding for any company that's making a Grape plug-in, 
rumors will start, and the next thing you know, major tech magazines 
will be printing that OSAF wants to buy XYZ Corp.

My rational brain realizes that I'm probably overestimating the 
world's interest in Chandler because *I* am so interested.  However, 
I *have* been contacted off-list by several email solution 
developers, so I know that *somebody* is watching.

Another issue is that any time I spend communicating is time that I 
am not spending on working on the wiki, thus delaying its rollout.

When something is in development with a group of people, it's even 
harder.  To be fair and accurate, I'd need to not only describe it 
but also convey the attached certainty level of everybody involved. 
This is hard: imagine if I needed to convey a decision to eat a grape 
vs. a tentative decision to eat a grape:
	1: "We want a grape."
vs.
	2. "We are thinking about having a grape, but it might be 
some other kind of fruit.  We do know that we want something sweet 
with a fair amount of Vitamin C.  Most of us are pretty sure that 
we'd prefer not to have seeds, though there's one guy who insists 
loudly that the seedless option isn't sustainable in the long term. 
Because the skins are so hard to get through, we're unanimously 
agreed that we don't want a coconut.  There is widespread 
disagreement about how much trouble peeling oranges and kiwis is: 
most people need a knife to peel kiwis but not oranges, but some 
people eat the skin of kiwis.  [Etc.]"

There's a lot of good information in option #2, but documenting it is 
a royal pain.  If I know I'm going to have to spend time negotiating 
the seeds/seedless option regardless of whether I document it or not, 
and that my documentation load will go down once I have a decision, 
I'm always going to hold off on documenting.


While it is always tempting to attribute someone's actions to their 
inherent personality, usually their actions are heavily influenced by 
their situation.  While I Do Not Speak For OSAF, I find it 
illustrative that my observed behavior suddenly matched their 
observed behavior when I was put into their situation.
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