Network Engineering 2015 Election Chat

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YLearn

03:26

@RyanFoley so thinking about your answers, it got me wondering so I will ask. Don't take any of this as criticism, I just want to see how you are balancing things in your own mind. How do you reconcile your stance on being more open and liberal with your responsibility to uphold the standards set by the community?

As a concrete example, you posted that you fully supported a post about being more open including allowing consumer devices.

Yet at the same time, the community has always consistently and strongly voted that consumer devices/home networking is off topic.

To this day, it is still the second lowest ranked category in our what should be on/off topic meta question.

Especially when by choosing to be more liberal, you would be in this case be having the "final say" over the what the community has decided.

Ryan Foley

04:07

I'm happy you asked and I don't take any of this as criticism. At the end of the day, it's my responsibility to give an accurate representation of what my stances are; even if others don't think that's a good way forward. If the community decides that they like my stance on things, then that’s what I’ll do when elected.

More often than not, there is a judgement call involved with casting a kill votes to questions, and that is up to individual interpretation. When I say ‘open and liberal’, I’m referencing a hands-off approach to casting votes and giving the benefit of the doubt to the OP…

In any case, even if the community doesn't vote me in, I can happily continue trying to contribute meaningful information and use my regular user votes to voice my opinion.

2 hours later…

YLearn

06:19

For reference, here is the post on meta your comment said you fully support. A good portion of the post centered on our policy of closing home networking and consumer questions.

Q: Being a more open community?

Dear fellow network engineers, I have been trying to contributing my two cents to this community, and have gotten back many interesting bits of knowledge in return. However, the site's strict management has been bothering me for a while so I tought I'd bring it up. I would like to ask if we coul...

discussion

So, to clarify, if someone where to post a question about consumer devices, which the community has clearly deemed are off topic, would you close it or no?

7 hours later…

Ryan Foley

13:46

I think we got 2 vastly different things out of that post and you should re-read that concern if that's the most you got out of it. Clearly the community agrees with his words. I don't support consumer grade equipment and would close it if it's a question revolving directly around it. But... not ever question someone asks has anything to do with the equipment they're using, and more about the underlying technologies and protocol operation.

I don't want to get in the habit of blindly closing questions because they make any mention of equipment that's off topic. Some effort should go into removing irrelevant portions and reading between the lines. If a question can be answered all the same (indiscriminate of the equipment), then what is the point in not just answering it? We aren't supporting consumer-grade equipment, we're helping a user understand a technology they otherwise wouldn't.

6 hours later…

YLearn

19:18

Oh, I certainly got more out of that post than that, however when someone posts that that I fully support this questions/answer to me that indicates you are agreeing on all points with no dissent, so I may have misunderstood your stance causing some confusion for me on how you planned to handle those.

I do apologize, as today has been very busy and I really haven't had much time to allocate here (and have a backlog of several responses I need to make elsewhere).