please be supportive and constructive towards agencies

[Stuart A. Yeates]

When you're commenting on or interacting with agencies, could I please
ask that you're supportive and constructive? To illustrate why I'd
like to present this short anonymised dialogue that happened over the
weekend.

A: cool sharing on the website of agency X http://...
B: agency X GOOD: sharing on http://... BAD: woeful markup

Unfortunately this was in a public forum, one which I happen to know
that X's publicity people are actively monitoring. The techies in
agency X have just been embarrassed in front of their publicity
people, and the negative remark is so general that the techies have no
idea what's perceived as being wrong with http://... and no way to
make their next conversation with their publicity people end happily.

It's fine to be honest about the way things are, but imagine these
alternative come-backs:

B: agency X GOOD: sharing on http://... BAD: needs microformats
http://microformats.org/
B: agency X GOOD: sharing on http://... BAD: needs validation
http://validator.w3.org/
B: agency X GOOD: sharing on http://... BAD: needs to be in XHTML
http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/
B: agency X GOOD: sharing on http://... BAD: needs an RSS feed
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS
B: agency X GOOD: sharing on http://... BAD: needs tables removed
http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10-HTML-TECHS/#tables-layout
B: agency X GOOD: sharing on http://... BAD: needs license
http://dublincore.org/documents/dcmi-terms/#terms-license

All of these provide (a) actual clarity about what might be wrong (and
lets not forget, it might be like that for a reason); (b) a URL in
case the maintainer of http://... has never heard of the cast-iron
rule they've broken.

Public non-constructive slagging off of agencies does no one any good.

cheers
stuart

[Y. Thong Kuah]

That's fair enough, and a comprehensive list of standards. I'm interested to know nature of "public forum", is this a digital forum, or at the barcamp (i.e. physical? ) What I'm getting at is the context of the forum.

--
Best regards,
Y. Thong Kuah

[David_Earle]

I have been thinking about Stuart's point - I don't think it is
restricted to comment on agencies. There was a comment in the middle
of one session "Did anyone here work for [x] company? I have never met
anyone from [x], but if I do, I want to kill them for what they did
with [y] product". Now, I fully understand and appreciate the jocular
nature of the comment and the context and enjoy this kind of debate.
And I also like the fact that we can get free and frank and get don't
have to be nice to each other all the time

But there is also a limiting of debate in these kinds of comments. And
at times I felt we were just exchanging position statements without
really getting anywhere. Converse to the above, was surfing through
the Koordinates OIA site afterwards and the back story to getting
geospatial data. Which led me to a 'now I see what you are talking
about' moment.

So my thought for the day, is if we want to progress our discussion,
we need to get down to much more specific situations and stories,
where we can start to unpack what has gone on, what we would like to
see and how to get there.

So as far as I am concerned - all good for Saturday, and looking
forward to engaging in lots more specific discussions and cases as
they develop and emerge.