The roads I take...

I just read a couple of messages about people shooting down a post about one community member's political views on Planet Mozilla.

I'm shocked once again how everything not conforming to "elite" far-left-wing views is being seen as rude, backwards, and unacceptable.

This is one reason why I post less and less in public at all about my personal views, as due to often not conforming with what is seen as being "cool" and "hype" in the left-wing standards apparently being in place widely both in the country I live in and the communities I tend to be part of online, I tend to get bombarded with negative statements every time I open my mouth about anything except my work.

Being open is to a large degree about accepting that other people have different views, even on controversial topics, tolerating their views, and requiring other people to change those to be able to work in the same community with them.
Unfortunately, it's is often those who insist most to call themselves "open" who seem to not be able to accept that.

That's what I find most sad about this discussion. Unfortunately it also means that people will not learn a lot about my personality on this blog - contrary to Gerv I don't have the stamina to be shot down on every controversial view I might take here (and note that I'll not even take a stand on either side of the topic he's writing about - I'll claim I know too little about the specific case to make any determination).

It started as an idea, but now it's live:

A "planet" of aggregated blogs from the German-speaking part of the Mozilla community!

You'll find it at planet.mozilla.de - and it still needs a lot more people to be added.

So, if you are a part of the Mozilla community and running your own blog that features posts in German and what you are working on in Mozilla, please file a bug and I'll get your feed added.

Note that the same basic rule applies as for the official Planet Mozilla: it's basically up to you what feed you give us (as long as the posts are in German language), but we'd like to show the whole personalities of the individuals in our community, so you don't have to confine this to strictly Mozilla-only posts - we appreciate the lives of people around here to be richer than one single topic!

Ich hoffe, wir lesen uns am deutschsprachingen Planet Mozilla!

Blogging life in many areas, especially in OSS developer communities like GNOME, KDE or Mozilla sometimes seems to actually orbit around planets, which are basically website feed aggregators that collect blogs from the whole community and show their entries at a single place. This way, you can read or watch one single site/feed and get a glimpse of information from the whole community.

Planet Mozilla is just such a site, and there has been some discussion recently about its administration, with the outcome that Asa is probably owning it now, a new set of peers for that administration has been decided, and we'll end up with this main planet site having the full range of all blog entries of "active Mozilla Community members" and a second feed that only has their Mozilla-related entries. Asa is doing a great job there, and despite of some differences of opinion I may with him from time to time, I'm glad he's taking care of that now.
Additionally, for all of us who are in the L10n community, there's another planet page up on the new L10n server, named as Planet Mozilla L10N.
I'll try to get this blog aggegrated on those planets, at least as soon as I have tag support here and can filter feeds for those where required (L10n, future Mozilla-related-only planet).

In other planetary news, I'm still a bit sad that the next Space Shuttle launch to our home planet's orbit has been pushed out due to damage caused by a hail storm and now can only take place after the ISS crew changeover from Expedition 14 to Expedition 15, which means I have to wait until at least late April to see another hopefully great Station construction mission. I hope they get the second half of P6 solar panels retracted more easily than the first half back on the STS-116 mission last December.

But until STS-117 goes out into orbit, I'll keep hoping their preparations go well and stick to those planets down here...