[Noisebridge-discuss] noise at noisebridge

[Jonathan Foote]

I definitely share the frustration, and I see other people
impacted/annoyed pretty much every time I stop by.

I self-identify as someone who is some distance into the autistic
spectrum. I personally tend to miss MANY social cues, and I think I
see a lot of that at NB (though it is certainly not my business to
diagnose). This may be a social hazard of hacker spaces as it
definitely seems to have a nontrivial correlation with the geek tribe.

There is no easy solution, but as Mitch suggests, a first strategy is
to be direct: "I'm sorry, I'm not interested in talking anymore" or
"I'm feeling a little uncomfortable with your attention" when people
(like me!) are missing basic non-verbal cues.

These are hard things to say as well as hear, but sometimes people
need to get that feedback, and it may even help us learn the cues that
we are missing. So you are not being a jerk, you are being honest, and
 I don't know of a better way of continuing to be excellent to one
another. And it would be excellent if we had a place where everyone
felt comfortable being themselves, as well as being OK hearing
negative -- if polite -- feedback.



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
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