Okay, you know the joke about the platypus (or giraffe--take your pick) being designed by committee, right? Now, normally, I'd disagree...but only because neither the giraffe nor the platypus have gone extinct. Mostly, though, I think that the success of group problem-solving is:
- Inversely proportional to the size of the group, and
- Directly proportional to the concreteness of the problem being solved. (Something like the Despair, Inc. "Meetings" lithograph, subtitled "None of us is dumber than all of us.")
Ah, but get a group of Linux users--a.k.a. incorrigible tinkerers--together, and watching them attack a well-defined problem is an unqualified
joy. In the case of tonight's
Linux User's Group meeting, it was the response to a simple, off-the-cuff question of how to make OpenOffice (an open-source clone of Microsoft's productivity suite) stop trying to think for you. Maybe it's a time-saver in an office environment, but nearly all tinkerers know precisely what they want to do, thank you very much. Thus, having OpenOffice impersonate Microsoft Office by automatically turning your typed list numbers into auto-formatted, auto-indented lists, or flag your correctly spelled acronyms and/or technical arcana as typos is a frustrating distraction from the problem at hand.
The meeting's presenter still had his laptop connected to the projector, and a few others fired up their laptops (and OpenOffice) to tackle the problem (which, it turns out, had annoyed more folks than the person who raised the question). And, lo! Within a few minutes, an answer had been worked out between various groups' trial and error. And there was much rejoicing. And at least one person's faith in the power of groups to solve (rather than embellish) problems was significantly boosted.
(Thanks, folks!)
