James Thigpen

I am currently attending the ALT.NET Seattle Conference. The energy and passion is really invigorating. It makes me want to be productive.

Scott Hanselman hosted a session named, “Why so mean?” that was really good. It asked the question “Are we the barrier to entry for new people being introduced to the ALT.NET movement?”. There are some abrasive personalities in ALT.NET which some people feel (including myself) can be a deterrent towards introducing new people to the ideas and practices that we evangelize. Scott did a great job facilitating the session and sort of guiding the conversation.

A great number of good points were made. For one, we talk a lot about teaching new people how to do these things, but we don’t spend a lot of time discussing pedagogy (the science/study of teaching). There is a session tomorrow inspired by that realization that I’m really excited to attend.

Discussing the session over dinner, someone made an observation that I thought was a little sad. One of the last statements on the “mean people” in our community (technically the word “Asshole” was bandied about quite readily) made during the session was along the lines of “There will always be mean people so you just have to accept that,” which I think is a bit a cop-out. If we’re going to claim to be a community, we should take responsibility for those in our community, not just give them a get out of jail free card.

It wasn’t all doom and gloom though. There was a lot of good discussion about how we can make ALT.NET more approachable to new people. It’s hard to do that though. I personally am still a bit intimidated talking to some of these people. Everyone is super nice though. It’s a great group of people and I can’t wait for tomorrow to get some more hot nerd on nerd dialog.