The whole membership deal.

[Michael Conrad]

    Ok, the whole membership thread seems to be getting political itself :-)
I feel obligated to say something about it myself in hopes that the list can
get back to more interesting and useful conversation.  I'll try to keep it
short and sweet.

    Background: In TUNES reckoning, I'm a newbie lurker.  I browsed to your
site on the recommendation of a friend.  I was immediately blown away by all
the cool ideas I saw while wandering around the site, and dug into it for
about 4 days straight, and then more slowly over the next couple weeks.  I
was interested in reading due to the thoughts that I shared in common with
you guys, including the political ideas.  After about a month I signed up
for the mailing list because the size and quantity of the ideas in this
project are kind of overwhelming, and i figured that I could just read the
list to see if some live conversation might help in understanding the
project.

    As far as membership is concerned, I could care less if my name is on a
list somewhere on the site.  I'm here for the ideas, not prestige by
association.  I think that if you have a list of people at all, it ought to
be for informational use.  Something that would answer questions such as
"who do I email if I want to help with project P", or "who do I contact to
get some help understanding the code in file F".  So, in dividing up the
member list it seems that instead of just "members" and "contributers", you
might divide people up based on *how* they contribute to the project.

    A small off-topic thought regarding the political ideas of TUNES:  A
person is more likely to listen to a good idea if they see the problem that
it solves.  By ranting about the limited design of C++'s classes, or the
problems associated with closed-source, or the difficulties involved with
interaction between programs written in dissimilar languages and compiled
into assembly, you show the problem that you intend to solve in a way that
the reader needs no explanation to agree with.  The reader has been there,
run into that problem, and is angry about it.  Thus, I think that political
ideas in general should be thoroughly linked to the content of the site.
(linked in terms of web page links, I mean)  This also keeps the reading
more interesting.

Anyway, there's a random sample from the newbie population.
-Michael Conrad