brain-dump thoughts on bridging the gap between 'leaders' and 'public'

[Presumably this will be turned into coherent english at some point, but for now I wanted to get my thoughts down and I figured some of you might be interested to see one of my brain-dumps edited just enough to be semi-comprehensible to others. Amusingly-enough turning this from my shorthand into something I figured you could actually follow more than quadrupled its length...]:

Very common problem with any organization: general 'public'/membership don't know what's going on with the leaders/who the people in any given possition are (elected, appointed, hired, volunteered, conscripted, blackmailed), what they're up to, what current business is being transacted
--> public too lazy to bother to find out or to listen when that info is shared - is somewhat their own damned fault
--> but as with all design issues anything that's "user-error" is almost always a faulty design that influences people to behave in an undesirable manner - if widespread is (almost) always structural design flaw (see The Design Of Everyday Things by Norman - READ IT NOW!!)
--> leaders/people in specific positions don't advertise this enough, don't distribute info widely enough in dif mediums, don't run things "open source" enough
--> depending on demographics, learning styles, lifestyles people have differing mediums to learn info that do/don't work as well - relying on just one medium will leave out too many
(side/related issue: email vs phone vs text vs im vs face-to-face - each mediums have strengths/weaknesses - each medium preferred by dif people depending on their learning styles, lifestyles, familiarity, context - dif mediums inaccessible to dif demo's and disenfranchise certain groups - need to understand this to communicate effectively w/ various people)
--> examples: umASS residence life, umASS bureaucracy in general, town govs, smaller obscure gov agencies, etc
--> need to offer as many oportunities for public to interact as possible - will get more active involvement, people will feel more empowered, will have better respect for the work that is getting done, will be more willing to pay for the work being done
--> can never reach everyone, too many people don't care, don't want to know - what's the right balance? when leave them to their bliss and tell them to shove off when they bitch unjustifiably?

Infrastructures (xkcd comic)

Yea... let me know when that violin of yours exits alpha and has a native OS X port...

Gruber and Pilgrim on Mac, Linux, "betterness" and data openness

(from 2006, but I only saw this now, and it is just as applicable now as ever)

YES YES YES: Gruber on Pilgrim's decision to switch from Mac to Linux (and what makes something 'better')

More yes:

I’m deeply suspicious of Mac users who claim to be perfectly happy with Mac OS X. Real Mac users, to me, are people with much higher standards, impossibly high standards, and who use Macs not because they’re great, but because they suck less than everything else. Pilgrim, to me, is a quintessential Mac user in that regard; and what he’s doing is wondering if maybe things might suck less somewhere else.

Pilgrim's primary concern is over data portability, which usually boils down to format openness and has hurt him many times - an issue that I am already quite concerned about myself and am trying to focus on more and more when I choose database-type software but have yet to be satisfied with. Proprietary concerns me far less than real world practical 'openness' in the data-portability sense. In my case the various factors in OS decision work out differently, but I really like the issue(s) that Pilgrim brought up and am thinking about them more than I used to. In fact, right now I am in the middle of trying to migrate my Aperture library over to my new clean instal, and am having issues with data corruption and file ownership permissions - I chose Aperture for its UI-level photo library management tools, but the biggest flaw with it is it's awkward library structure under the hood which lock me into the Aperture ecosystem. Would I make the same decision again to lock myself into Aperture? Yes, but only because there still is nothing 'better' out there (for me) - I can't wait to jump ship the moment something does come along though.

in which open source engineers fail to grasp the full picture

BitquaBit

why free/open source software tends to be terribly designed

oldie but goodie (and part 2) [via Slashdot]