Let’s Talk with David Eaves, Part I

David Eaves is a writer and speaker who advocates for open communication and open data. He helped draft the Open Motion for the city of Vancouver, and regularly advises the mayor on open data and open government policies. His extensive experience both in the public and private sector as a negotiator has provided him with exceptional insight into how people communicate, a topic CSEDEV has previously explored in great depth. In the first part of our conversation, I asked him about his work with the collaborative open source software Bugzilla, an offshoot of Mozilla. This quickly led into a discussion about how a purely online format raises challenging communication issues.

DE: I gave a talk at the Mozilla summit a few weeks ago. During the talk I was looking at a bug in Bugzilla; it had a huge long conversation attached to it. If you looked at the conversation, everybody shows up and basically argues for what they believe in. Nobody ever actually paraphrases or tries to show they understand what somebody else is saying. Nobody asks clarifying questions, nobody engages any of the behaviors that normal people do when they’re engaged in a conversation with someone they’re working with. I’m really interested in how we can change the software to prompt or nudge people to make better choices and more human choices in their conversations.

JI: Do you think that’s because people perceive technology as still being this faceless, inhuman force, so there’s this kind of reticence to communicate in the way you normally would?

DE: I think that’s part of it. Another possibility is when this started off, Bugzilla was relatively small. There weren’t that many people who were on it, so everybody knew each other; there was a lot more give in the system. Now that there’s thousands of people on it, the personal connections that may have greased that community no longer exist. The initial attitude of, “Let’s be unbiased and neutral in our tone and unemotional and try to argue things rationally” has turned into an attitude of, “I’m going to be neutral but really aggressive.” And so it comes across as very passive-aggressive.

This article is continued.