[Noisebridge-discuss] noise at noisebridge

[Paul Böhm]

Well,

personally i've managed to tell people clearly i don't want to listen
to their bullshit - and that works.
having to overhear nonsense is hard, but headphones work.

however i'm worried that if we have too much nonsense-talking people here, then
only people with a very high tolerance for nonsense and bullshit will
stick around.

this is especially true since the people i'm thinking about, almost
hunt after newcomers, who are too polite to verbalize that after 15
minutes of nonsense they are feeling really uncomfortable.

paul

On Sat, Feb 28, 2009 at 7:18 PM, Josh Myer <josh at joshisanerd.com> wrote:
> On Sat, Feb 28, 2009 at 06:54:36PM -0800, Paul Böhm wrote:
>> ok, my brain is about to explode - there's people here at nb who
>> constantly babble nonsense because they are attention starved
>> this alienates newcomers (since they haven't learned to ignore these
>> people yet) and makes me want to avoid noisebridge
>>
>> opinions on this?
>
> I totally agree with the frustration, and feel it acutely.  As for
> fixes: Wear headphones?  Set expectations that you're not someone
> who's going to just listen?  These two strategies have served me well
> thus far...  Then again, I'm pretty comfortable with being a jerk.
>
> In the same vein, we have a lot of people who think of noisebridge as
> a place to hang out, not a place to come and hack.  It's frustrating
> many of us, especially because we haven't found a good way to say
> "It's awesome that you're here, and we'd love to help you work on
> stuff.  What do you want to work on, and how can our community help
> you accomplish that?"  It's sort of insidious: there's nobody who is
> clearly abusing the space, it's just that people's behaviors are
> shifting the way people use the space.  noisebridge is inadvertantly
> becoming a place to come and surf youtube in the evening instead of a
> place to hang out with others who are soldering, coding, or sewing.
>
> Personally, I only come in to work/collaborate on specific things.
> It's kind of a bummer, but it's not so bad.  I wind up being a
> floating question-answerer (or, at least, reference-pointer-outer)
> anyway, so I get sucked into interesting things beyond my little
> focus.  If I was less flexible or pragmatic about how I used my time
> in the space, though, this would be incredibly frustrating.
>
> I think the general problem of people-who-are-distracting is solved
> with a single question: how do we integrate people into our do-acracy
> and minimize idle hands at 83c?
> --
> Josh Myer   650.248.3796
>  josh at joshisanerd.com
>