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On Thu, 10 May 2007 15:26:32 +0100 "Ray Smith" <rjsmith@xxxxxxx> wrote: > I have always found the people on this user group to be polite, helpful, > mindful of the fact that we are not all experts and above all encouraging. > Thanks to you all, guys > > Neil Winchurst Lest anyone new to the group forgets: we 'old hands' were all newbies once too. My newbie antics are still in the DCGLUG archive (Sep 2000 onwards). I firmly believe that a newbie-only list is a very bad idea. By all means delete, skip or ignore those threads that are beyond your needs or comprehension but please do not ignore the possibility of self-improvement. Over these 7 years, I have learnt a lot myself and as my Debian workload has increased I have sat back recently and watched several members grow in confidence and develop as contributors. There was a time when myself, Simon, Alex or Neil Stone answered almost every email. Now new people have taken on that role and the 'old timers' chip in from time to time to reminisce. ;-) That is an important objective of this group - to seek to encourage GNU/Linux users to learn and solve their own problems and those of others. Sharing starts with each newbie - a problem solved becomes knowledge that can help someone else. A collection of problems solved leads to an ex-newbie who is able to help others whilst still learning more. From there, members often progress to more complex environments (like upstream development or working within one of the distributions) where suddenly they are a newbie all over again, learning to solve a different set of problems. Everyone benefits from sharing equally amongst such a diverse group - locking away one sub-set only encourages an us-and-them attitude that is unfair and can only act to constrain the freedom of the members themselves. It would be insufferably boring if every newbie stayed locked into their own newbie world without any serious prospect of being challenged, enthused or motivated into doing something every so slightly outside their comfort zone. We pass this way but once - the least we can do is seek out new challenges and strive to improve our lot. -- Neil Williams ============= http://www.data-freedom.org/ http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/ http://www.linux.codehelp.co.uk/
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