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Okay so apparently I’ve gone and agreed to some deal wherein I match every blog post made by a couple of my with my own blog post. I’m not really sure about the rules, and I couldn’t actually remember I had agreed to it until this morning when Anna’s blog featured a new post reminding me. I was originally going to do another “around town” post and had some pictures ready until I realised there was something else I’d been thinking about recently.

I like Twitter, I’m logged into it whenever I’m at home, and love following lots of different people with whom I wouldn’t otherwise be able to communicate. One of the people I follow is Jeph Jacques the author and artist for my favourite webcomic Questionable Content. I like to follow Jeph on twitter as well as most of the characters from his webcomic (yes he’s created twitter accounts for them and they post to each other and stuff, it’s totally awesome). But that isn’t what this post is about. Jeph a couple of days ago posted a few tweets about an incident that started over at Penny Arcade with one of their comics. I only heard about the rage from Jeph’s tweets about it but apparently it was all because PA had used the word “faggot” in a comic in a derogatory context (no they weren’t talking about bundles of sticks).

Jeph went on to say how he didn’t consider the way they used the word to be offensive, but understood that some people thought that usage of the word was intrinsically offensive. Okay, with you so far Jeph. Then he tweeted “Honestly, I think the PA strip is meant to show how awful and idiotic it is to call ANYONE that word. But I still get why it bothered people”. And that’s where I start to disagree. I use the word faggot in a derogatory sense all the time both in text (usually shorted to “fgt” in IRC or WoW) and spoken. I don’t think it is “awful and idiotic” to call people that word, atleast not the way I use it. I think language is more complex than that. Language evolves and changes and the meanings of words and how they’re used changes. The way I (and some of my other friends) have come to use the word a lot is not really malicious at all, but it is still used as an insult. It’s mostly ironic, used purely as an insult and completely disassociated from any connection the word has from homosexuals or bundles of sticks, and I seriously think it’s fine. Queer is another word which I think used to be an insult towards homosexuals but is now used all the time (and I don’t even think it’s taboo any more, unlike nigger, which is a word I still hesitate to use eventhough it appears in heaps and heaps of rap music). Maybe it’s one of those things where it’s okay for the insulted party to use the word, but not anyone else. Fuck that I’m not going to play by those rules, that’s descrimination too. I think sometimes the insulted parties in those cases like to argue that the word has taken on a different meaning to the original (derogatory) meaning rendering it fine for use. Well then it should be fine for everyone. This taboo word business is bullshit, you’re always going to offend someone with what you do, no matter what it is. I get offended with all the biblebashers (collective term for people of any faith who come around looking to convert - bible here is not inherently Christian, “holy book” doesn’t provide the same alliteration and doesn’t have the same ring to it) who come around asking me to be saved and using words which are inherently filled with the judgements of their biblebash-y values - no one is exempt from causing offense. To communicate effectively you cannot help but cause offense sometimes. There was a a great debate about whether it’s fine to cause offense in communication I saw last year on ABC Fora but I can’t find it because the search function on their website is crap :P

When and why was faggot ever used as a derogatory term for homosexuals anyway? What is the origin of the insultory meaning? Surely the bundles of sticks meaning came first? So then it became corrupted into a derogatory term? My point is that language changes and there are no hard and fast rules about how you should use words.

One of the reasons I’m blogging about this is that I’m completely sick of all the political correctness that gets attached to everything these days and all the really vague and fluffy language that goes along with trying not to offend anyone. You can’t communicate effectively like that. Have you ever heard Tony Abbott speak? It’s disgraceful, he never actually says anything (I’m not kidding) and he especially never answers the question. Sure, you might argue that there are other factors going on here like Abbott trying not to say anything that might amount to less people voting for him, or maybe trying not to give away whatever non-existant policies/positions they take to the government to latch onto and criticise. But those are just variations on censoring his own language for political (correctness) purposes. Here’s a really good talk about modern fluffy language I saw recently on ABC Fora (such a good site). All this fluffy language people think is communicating is really just obfuscation.

The title of this post from a WoW guild on US-Blackrock called <sup fresh our turn baby>. I have no idea what this means, but it contains the word fresh so I thought I’d borrow it to indicate my first new blog post in a while :P

Recently my software engineering project team at uni went through a fairly significant restructuring. The project we are working on is a backend for an existing system so it’s pretty technical. We decided to go with a less hierarchical, more flexible approach to organising the team because we didn’t want to get bogged down with too much overhead. Communication between subteams (implementation, design, testing etc) was very “flat”, ie. anyone can communicate with anyone else in another subteam, communication doesn’t need to go through team leads.

However, after first semester it was clear things weren’t really working out. Progress was being made but we were behind schedule with implementation and very little testing had been done at all. Not having an assistant project manager to take over during the midyear break didn’t help much either, especially since we were supposed to make our first release to the client a week after the end of first semester exams. In order to turn the project around the team underwent a large reorganisation at the start of second semester.

Big changes were made in terms of communication and decision making. We still have subteams and subteam leads, but a few of the subteam leaders were replaced, and team members were assigned to particular subteam(s) rather than be given the choice. Previously, decisions which affected the entire team were made with the entire team present and subteam decisions were made during those subteam meetings with input from the subteam members. Now decisions which affect the entire team are generally made by the PM and Assistant PM, with consultation from the subteam leaders at the weekly team leaders’ meeting (a new addition this semester).

Obviously the original, flexible way of running the team failed. It relied a lot on team members being very pro-active which wasn’t really the case (except for a couple of exceptions). It also relied a lot on having really good communication. We initially decided to be quite light-weight in terms of the amount of processes we used. The communication processes were pretty much just common sense. However, communication was really one of the first challenges we faced as a whole team. During team meetings people were afraid to speak up, and so decisions didn’t really get made. Perhaps one of the reasons for this was that we didn’t really know each other very well, we hadn’t had any social events yet, so everyone was still kind of in that stage where you go out of your way to be super polite and not rock the boat with anyone.

I think communicating effectively in teams relies a lot on people being comfortable enough with each other to be able to tell someone when they need to lift their game. If the team is not comfortable enough with each other to tell someone they need to improve it’s very difficult for the team as a whole to make improvements. This was possibly one of the reasons it took such a long time to rectify many of the problems which caused problems in first semester (resulting in schedule slippage), along with the lack of initiative shown by team members to stay focussed on getting tasks done and plan for what needs to be done next. It’s not good enough to be able to tell someone they aren’t contributing enough over email, because it’s very difficult to make people accountable over email.

I think communication problems can often be much more serious than team members being too scared to speak in front of the team, or critique each other. Some people have a habit of talking a lot without actually saying much. A lot of words are said but not much information is conveyed. My project team has atleast two people who do this. It’s really frustrating as it can take up a lot of time during meetings or conversation, and afterwards you aren’t at all clear what point they were trying to make, even if they seem to think they’ve said something incredibly profound.

What is the solution to these communication issues? I’m not entirely sure. UML is a language which lets people convey technical information in a way which is concise and consistant (ie. there’s only one way to interpret it). I don’t think it’s possible (or even wise) to introduce a similar language specifically for the purposes of cutting out superfluous words in order to enable people to communicate in a more concise manner - it could start sounding like the Newspeak in the novel 1984. I think different people communicate in different ways for different reasons, for some people it seems speaking is part of their thought process. In that case perhaps the best you can do is ask people to clarify what they mean. It’s just part of the challenge of working in teams :)