Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Simplify, simplify, simplify!

Henry David Thoreau

We have a tendency, as leaders in an open community, to over-explain ourselves. Part of this is because we want to clearly explain our decisions to a diverse group of people. Part of this is because we often come from engineering, science, or other heavily factual backgrounds and we want to not only be correct, but completely correct. You may have your own reasons to add.

Whatever the reason, transparency and accuracy are good things. We want this. But the goal is clear communication, and sometimes adding words reduces the clarity of communication. This can be from turning the message into a wall of text that people won't read. It can also be because it gives people distractions to latch onto.

The latter point is key to the situation which prompted me to add this topic to my todo list months ago. The leadership body of a project I'm connected to put out an "internal" (to the project) statement after overruling a code-of-conduct-adjacent decision by another group. The original group removed a contributor's privileges after complaints about purported abuse of the privileges. The decision happened without a defined process and without discussing the matter with the contributor in question. Thus, the leadership body felt it was not handled appropriately and restored the privileges.

Unfortunately, the communication to the community was far too long. It offered additional jumping off points for arguing and whatabout-ing. Responses trying to address the arguments added more things for people to (by their own admission) unfairly interpret what was said.

Especially when it comes to code of conduct enforcement and other privacy-sensitive issues, the community is not entitled to your entire thought process. Give a reasonable explanation and then stop.

During my time on the Fedora Council, I collaborated with the other Council members to write many things, both sensitive and not-at-all sensitive. In almost every case, the easy part was coming up with words. The hard part was cutting the unnecessary words. If you can cut a word or phrase without losing clarity, do it.

This post's featured photo by Volodymyr Hryshchenko on Unsplash.

The post Sometimes saying less is more appeared first on Duck Alignment Academy.

04 Feb 2026 12:00pm GMT

Site update time. This week I updated some of the resources on this site. First, I created a metrics resources page, available from the Resources drop down menu. On this page, I've collected links to tools and guidance for capturing various metrics that may be useful about your community.

I also updated the AI policy resources page to add links to policies from the Eclipse Foundation, Ghostty, and the OpenInfra Foundation. Shout out to Kate Holterhoff at Red Monk for putting together a detailed analysis and timeline of AI policies in FOSS.

As always, if there's a resource that you find valuable, please share it with me so that I can add it.

This post's featured photo by Sincerely Media on Unsplash.

The post New metrics resource page and update AI policy links appeared first on Duck Alignment Academy.

04 Feb 2026 11:00am GMT

Putting some rigour to generations

Recently a coworker posted that children born this year would be in Generation Beta, and I was like "What? That sounds like too soon…" but then thought "Oh its just that thing when you get older and time flies by." I saw a couple of articles saying it again, so decided to look at what was on the wikipedia article for generations and saw that yes 'beta' was starting.. then I started looking at the lengths of the various generations and went "Hold On".

Let us break this down in a table:

So it is bad enough that Generation X,Millenials, and Z got shortened from 18 years to 15.. but alpha and beta are now down to 12 and 13? I realize that this is because all of this is a made up construct to make some people born in one age group angry/sad/afraid in another by editors who are needing to sell advertising for things which will solve the feelings of anger, sadness, or fear.. but could you at least be consistent.

I personally like some order to my starting and ending dates for generations so I am going to update some lists I have put out in the past with newer titles and times. We will use the definiton as outlined at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation

A generation is all of the people born and living at about the same time, regarded collectively.[1] It also is "the average period, generally considered to be about 20-30 years, during which children are born and grow up, become adults, and begin to have children."

For the purpose of trying to set eras, I think that the original 18 years for baby boomers makes sense, but the continual shrinkflation of generations after that is pathetic. So here is my proposal for generation ending dates outside. Choose which one you like the best when asked what generation you belong to.

(*) I say wikipedia here, but they are basically taking dates from various other sources and putting them together.. which should be seen as more on the statement of social commentators who aren't good at math.

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