Cultural-inhibitors
Some cultures are typically louder than others. Some are more aggressive. Some consider it inappropriate for anyone other than the 'boss' to speak up. Even within a culture, some people are intrinsically quiet or loud, shy or bold. Any large group of people contains all types. The loud, aggressive people have no problem getting their ideas out there. What can we do to enable others, without expecting them to change their basic nature?
People are reluctant to speak at the microphone
Many people, from any background, are shy to speak at the microphone. They may be worried about language skills; they may not like getting up in front of a crowd; they may be worried others will think their idea is dumb.
Ideas to enable sharing of ideas, while minimizing embarrassment:
- Have people type their question into IRC, and someone else reads it at the microphone
Note: the question can be sent to the designated reader in a private chat channel, hence further reducing any embarrassment about 'public' exposure.
We can as well just do IRC meetings instead of teleconferences. We tried this in a subgroup of EPUB subgroup with mediocre success. Mozilla does this sort of meetings too. — Kang-Hao (Kenny) Lu 03:06, 15 October 2013 (UTC)
- What else...?
...
The None-of-my-business concept
In the open source world, there is a concept like "if you ask why something doesn't happen, that's because you don't make it happen", but obviously there are few people who want to devote time into making things happen. Why should I participate in the CSS work if even Facebook engineers participate so little (sorry, I know this might not be fair because a Facebook engineer might post under a gmail.com address and such)? In other words, people usually think Web standards is non of their business and they are already doing their best if they criticize these Web standards on Twitter, Facebook or their personal blogs, which are not constructive to the W3C work actually.
I don't have an idea besides that I tell them that, instead of saying things like "please reconsider", they can participate by doing this and that, but then they leave.
Back to Encouraging-Participation