Sometimes saying less is more

Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Simplify, simplify, simplify!

Henry David Thoreau

We have a tendency, as leaders in an open community, to over-explain ourselves. Part of this is because we want to clearly explain our decisions to a diverse group of people. Part of this is because we often come from engineering, science, or other heavily factual backgrounds and we want to not only be correct, but completely correct. You may have your own reasons to add.

Whatever the reason, transparency and accuracy are good things. We want this. But the goal is clear communication, and sometimes adding words reduces the clarity of communication. This can be from turning the message into a wall of text that people won’t read. It can also be because it gives people distractions to latch onto.

The latter point is key to the situation which prompted me to add this topic to my todo list months ago. The leadership body of a project I’m connected to put out an “internal” (to the project) statement after overruling a code-of-conduct-adjacent decision by another group. The original group removed a contributor’s privileges after complaints about purported abuse of the privileges. The decision happened without a defined process and without discussing the matter with the contributor in question. Thus, the leadership body felt it was not handled appropriately and restored the privileges.

Unfortunately, the communication to the community was far too long. It offered additional jumping off points for arguing and whatabout-ing. Responses trying to address the arguments added more things for people to (by their own admission) unfairly interpret what was said.

Especially when it comes to code of conduct enforcement and other privacy-sensitive issues, the community is not entitled to your entire thought process. Give a reasonable explanation and then stop.

During my time on the Fedora Council, I collaborated with the other Council members to write many things, both sensitive and not-at-all sensitive. In almost every case, the easy part was coming up with words. The hard part was cutting the unnecessary words. If you can cut a word or phrase without losing clarity, do it.

This post’s featured photo by Volodymyr Hryshchenko on Unsplash.