freedom of expression is more significant to me than elgg, so i am leaving.

since i do not wish to participate in a dictatorial, controlling environment where those 'on high' swoop in and censor and control without consultation - i will no longer be participating in this community, nor offering support to any of my plugins here. despite having invested several years of coding experience into this project in useful ways, i value integrity and free will far more than i do any piece of software or corporate policy.

i now see exactly what richard stallman meant when he delineated between open source and free software - i didn't comprehend him at that time - he is correct when he effectively said that any software environment and the coders that support it, that operate in a way that is any other than 'totally free' will always attempt to control you in some way when you interact with it/them.

control is never a solution and is always the problem.

truly i do not wish to dump elgg, however, i will not compromise here.

to attempt to limit and control the activity of those who co-create a community that provides free software TO BUILD COMMUNITIES, shows a fundamental lack of comprehension of what the essence of a community IS and does not give me confidence in the awareness and understanding of the ones involved who would make such a choice.

  • FYI, just wasted 15 meeting trying to understand what this banter is about. IMHO, time better spent assisting someone that has problems other than lack of domain for self-expression. Don't mean to hurt anyone's feelings, but off-topic alienates people that want and can stay on topic.

  • I don't think there is anything wrong with the intentions of the core team, on the contrary. You are doing indeed an incredible job and should be credited much more than you are in this community.  

    I think that Ura is exaggerating in those parts of his statement, because he feels he is not heard . I still think there is a solution for this, by technically facilitating off topic discussions to communities where they belong. That would probably tremendously help all of this users beyond the tech support there are receving now.

    I've said it before (don't know if anyone read it). Create a multi-site where users can pick topics of their choice and take them to the community who welcomes them. And it can be done, Coldtrick made an IDP plugin that works with multi-site, so users can easily move to other communities with existing accounts. The whole solution is still a bit rough, but works. With help from some of the amazing developers here, we can create a community of communities, where everybody can express themselves as freely as possible with the right set of people.

  • I wouldn't be opposed to the idea a walled off 'offtopic' zone if there was enough demand for it, however that means that it would be another thing for me to create, maintain, and moderate... to be honest I don't want the extra work.

    Why not move such discussion to your own sites?  Or create an elgg-users facebook group or something?

    Nobody is saying you can't make friends here, I've made many, and I have non-elgg related discussions with them in other forums.

    For perspective, here's the communities of other software packages:

    Oxwall: http://www.oxwall.org/forum

    Drupal: https://drupal.org/forum

    Joomla: http://community.joomla.org/index.php

    Wordpress: http://make.wordpress.org/community/

     

    None of them have any sections for random stuff, all are topical.  We're not limiting anything any more than other open source software communities.

  • thanks to all who are participating here for responding

    to be clear here, before i respond to the your thoughts - the purpose of my elgg based website is to help to heal us and that includes healing my own and society's imbalances holistically in all possible ways. in that process i have studied the patterns of the planet and have watched the many cases of abuses of position/responsibilty - whether it be the genocide in canada over generations (blacked out in media)  - or the causes of the riots in england, ukraine and many other locations. i have been handcuffed, lost circulation in my hands and held in a prison cell here for doing no more than going about my day to day *not harming anyone* activity.. and i have been involved with various corporations - who after lengthy research, i now know to have been directly or indirectly responsible for acts of pure evil that the majority remain unaware of, including those who still act as their agents now.

    so i am quite 'touchy' or 'sensitive' (you might think - from the position of someone who is not so aware of these aspects of earth and who has not been so emotionally triggered as i have been) about being 'silenced' in any context at all - i would rather move on than be 'put under' any (denied) over-control whatsoever. maybe some of you have experienced far worse than i have, i do not know - i am just sharing some details of me.

    @kanha -

    "Recently in Oxwall forum they just deleted http://www.oxwall.org/forum/topic/15724 when people were expressing unhappiness over the latest 1.6 release."

    ok, i also perceive they have issues there and that is why i chose elgg originally.. since i saw that there appeared to be less focus on money here than at oxwall. in some senses the 'difficult part' of creating a project that is totally free is more complete here than at oxwall, so this is part of why i am angry that the simple parts are being avoided/ignored and replaced by 'shut up'.

    @brett

    - "Freedom of expression is not being violated by requesting conversations remain on topic."

    at issue in heart here is 'who is deciding what is and what is not 'on-topic'?
    i already gave an example of how this type of regulation can make unnecessary limitations. this space has the capacity to easily facilitate conversations that are not 'pure elgg.. technical only speak' without blocking anyone else from doing what they are doing: this would make space for remote relationships to evolve and new opportunities and ideas to be created. your reptition of the pattern of not saying much except 'stick to the policy' is further evidence that i am correct in some of what i am saying and does nothing to evolve the situation.

    i can guarantee you will enjoy elgg more if there is a greater harmony and spirit here - and i guarantee that can be achieved quite easily though facilitating & enhancing community interaction rather than regulating it with rules (that are open to interpretation by the few). perhaps the fact that this new rule only appeared years into the project, as soon as someone spoke of stopping using money, is 'just pure chance' - however, i know that 'pure chance' does not exist - since our intent and thought process defines the action.

    "None of the admins' actions prevent you from expressing yourself as you see fit through appropriate venues"

    i disagree in the sense that we have been silenced already on a topic that can easily be related to elgg.. indeed, that is part of the reason why it was in the elgg community - since the topic relates to any activity that can be associated with money. whether this is true for you (or not) does not change that this can be true for others who think differently to how you are thinking now.
    i do agree with you here in that i can leave this community and find more appropriate avenues to 'participate in the co-creation of community' and no-one is stopping me.

    @juho:

    "I'm not aware of any commercial intentions. What exactly are these claimed intentions?"

    note that i used the word 'perceive', in that i am referring to my own thinking, not absolute fact. i am doing this since i do not have access to the full information mentally - which is partially due to the lack of communication and interaction between us all. i don't know much detail about most of the co-creators of this community and of elgg - what i do know comes in small pieces from time to time.
    for example, i notice that most (maybe all) of the coders of plugins that are popular are also selling their elgg services in one way or another. i am not making this 'bad' or 'wrong' - i am just pointing to this as an observation. i know from experience that when we choose to do something 'to make money' that we would not be doing anyway for fun, we open the space/door for loss of respect (of self and others, since doing what you don't want to be doing REQUIRES a loss of self respect) and that can cause other dysfunctional patterns - one of which is the desire to control others for various well-known reasons (yet often unconscious in the ones involved). (for reference, examine just about any major corporation that is 'profit driven' and how dysfunctional/psychopathic they often are in comparison to a harmonious family - remembering that all life is 1 family).

    "Only once during my life has someone from the community actually paid me for making a custom plugin for them."

    ok, as i said, i don't have much to go on - except i see on your profile that you work as part of a web software group and only a small 'leap of imagination' is required to think that this would be 'on topic' to the idea of also being an elgg core coder. and certainly i have generalised to some extent - yet since i am not blaming and do not intend to cause guilt - i have nothing to apologise for in my innacurate statements.

    "I chat with many community members online (e.g. in Skype and Google hangouts). Some of them have become very good friends of mine."

    ok sure, i don't doubt that - yet how would anyone else know? since there is no evidence of that in the community here? and to be clear, i am basing my statements on what i observe in the behaviour patterns within the community and what i have seen in large organisations amongst seasoned developers. the 'rule based' mental over-focus is one of the identifying factors of long-term programmers and is part of why, as far as i am aware, there are almost no women in this community - since they are usually energetically more emotional and less overly mental. there are, from what i see, many women in the oxwall community.. the colours are warmer and the vibration is more community oriented than here. balance is essential in all things that succeed.

    @ismayil

    "off-topic alienates people that want and can stay on topic"

    alienation is an exclusory process, where one (minority or group) is pushed away by another, through lack of acceptance. the action of speaking 'off topic' can never be alienating since the action is not intended to reject others. silencing conversation based on 'choice of topic' IS alienating. if i talk endlessly about a plugin i make for elgg that you have zero interest in.. i can still block up the river with that talk and yet by the definition of 'on topic' here, that would be fine.. this is an example of broken logic and part of why enforcing rules and control on expression is always a problem and never a solution.

    this comes back to the realisation that all of this can be easily resolved by simple changes to the community software, as has already been said. such change would improve elgg for everyone across all installs.. namely, the ability to better filter the river. doing this would cause the issue of 'on or off topic' to be irrelevant and would enhance the usefulness of elgg in all senses as an information system *and the code already exists*. i am disturbed by the denial of this topic and the insistance to instead enforce rules. what i feel here is an unspoken and unconscious desire to control the group being labelled as 'a common sense approach' - the same energetic that occurs daily across the globe and causes so much heartache.
    surely the fact that the core coders use google and not elgg to communicate, regardless of the 'off' or 'on' topic use of community.elgg.org, is pointing to the need for improvement to the elgg platform in terms of filtering of information!?

    if i am mistaken here, be aware that i only created some of these ideas due to total lack of available information on the topic, due to such shortage of open intercourse and discussion within the community here. if this were a 'real life' community that was not online-only, none of this would be occurring and we would all know each other much better by now instead of living only with imagination and an lcd screen.

    in summation -

    now i have more to go on that 'shut up' and i wonder if some type of evolution can now occur here. at least we have a rare thread where most of the active ones are all present in one place!

  • @gerard - no disrespect intended to you here, though i will not lie - some of those i pointed to who do great evil are those who you are proud to serve with your website.

    to be clear here, anyone that thinks 'elgg is just a technical thing' and 'speaking of corporations and evil/compassion' is 'off topic' is denying the essence of what a community IS and has much to learn.

    @matt -

    "I wouldn't be opposed to the idea a walled off 'offtopic' zone if there was enough demand for it, however that means that it would be another thing for me to create, maintain, and moderate... to be honest I don't want the extra work."

    thankyou for your honesty. i am not asking you to be the one to do it.
    creating a new group is super simple.
    a simple alteration to the river query to get started, that excludes that group - would not be difficult.
    code to actually filter the river by group (for 1.7) already exists.

  • if i talk endlessly about a plugin i make for elgg that you have zero interest in.. i can still block up the river with that talk and yet by the definition of 'on topic' here, that would be fine.. this is an example of broken logic and part of why enforcing rules and control on expression is always a problem and never a solution.this comes back to the realisation that all of this can be easily resolved by simple changes to the community software, as has already been said. such change would improve elgg for everyone across all installs.. namely, the ability to better filter the river. doing this would cause the issue of 'on or off topic' to be irrelevant and would enhance the usefulness of elgg in all senses as an information system *and the code already exists*. i am disturbed by the denial of this topic and the insistance to instead enforce rules. what i feel here is an unspoken and unconscious desire to control the group being labelled as 'a common sense approach' - the same energetic that occurs daily across the globe and causes so much heartache.

    I fully agree. Software/php script changes can be made to make such changes easily.
    Let certain topics appear in river and certain topics not appear - this should be easily do-able.

    Blocking the river with on-topic but zero-interest plugin can also be easily put off if there are measures in the software that puts, say 10, conversations in the format "and 9 more comments" .... like that - you get the idea. Similar thing is alreay there in oxwall script - where you post a photo, then like it, then comment it - the verb changes in the river and only one entry remains not multiple ones.

    So I beleive Ura this should be done - even a plugin / mod would be so welcome immediately for those who want to do this in their Elgg site

  • interesting i thought the admins here got a cutt of commision from hosting sales thank you too all admins i appreciate your time and effort i did not realize you guys do this free and maybe get a job here and there for design etc but it is more or less free as far as i can tell

  • no disrespect intended to you here, though i will not lie - some of those i pointed to who do great evil are those who you are proud to serve with your website.

    No problem, I do not agree with all of my famous members, I even publicly accused one of them for doing evil and act unethical.

    I do not mind if core or any other developers are making money out of their work (I do like to change the concept of money itself). We all need to live and we all need to be awarded for the good things we do. I even hired some developers myself from this community.

    Last plea to the core team. Please implement Ura's suggestion and skip mine (to difficult) so we can all move on and get back to creating better software and a better community.

  • There are a few points that I think should help all of us as a community to thrive. For example if the elgg core developers, community admins and the regular members can follow this simple steps or common sense... 

    Note: this comment is written without any biasness towards any core developer, admin nor elgg member! It is written with good intentions-- so read it with an open mind please.

    P= Praise 

    • Every elgg community member deserves to be praised for a job well done and or for attaining excellent work.

    R= Respect

    • Every elgg community member should be treated with respect

    A = Attitude

    • Attitude makes a big difference. The tone of each member, work and time can make a big difference.

    I = Imagination

    • We should encourage the "outside" of the box thinking with all of our members. I think what most members are kindly requesting is just a simple or something different or special e.g more elgg community tools or expanding the community room -  if the request is well received and implemented accordingly soon or in the near future, all old and new and future elgg members will benefit from it.

    S = Star performer

    • All elgg members who perform exceptionally well in their projects or tasks should be recognized.

    E = Energize

    • All elgg members will agree with me that an energetic member will be invigorated vigorously, and will always be active

    All of the above strategies will ensure that all elgg members will be recognized for their contributions to the elgg community or organization which includes the delivery of excellent customer service from the core developers and community admins.

    Just think about this "To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong" Joseph Chilton Pearce.