I read this post from Sigrid Ellis today, and it reminded me some parts of Enrico’s last Debconf talk. This is Sigrid’s post:
Enrico talked more broadly about relationship dynamics within Debian community members. He focuses on consent as the most sustainable strategy for long-term collaborations. Where consent is not a priority, heroism has space to grow, but this can also mean that heroes could maintain or even create new emergency situations to keep themselves active and important. The long-term strategy of preventing emergencies by continuous (albeit less visible) care requires another set of skills, but is ultimately more efficient. Isn’t there a say that goes like “doctors should not focus on healing the sick, but on educating the healthy”?
There is definitely something about the continuous celebration of heroic deeds that shadows care continuous successes, but I don’t want to just hold the media responsible for it. I think that recognising the usefulness of maintenance routines (housekeeping, nature conservation of non-charismatic endangered species and ecosystems, education (of any kind), care of one’s physical and mental health) would take us very far and will still leave space for heroic acts. One thing I would work on is to underline the intermediate steps between indifference and emergencies. I don’t want to either destroy nature or save a rare bird (or worse: do both!). I want to be aware of smaller and useful actions that I can do before heroes need to be called.
aghisla draws 