Handling Work-related Issues

It depends on the issue, but the first step you should take is to discuss it openly on the mailing-list.

If we take an inability to meet deadlines as an example, having the discussion in the open allows people to give their opinion about the eventual external factors that may be influencing the deadlines (that the manager may have overlooked), and in general it helps to generate general discussions about what is expected of employees and reinforces the shared knowledge of what is acceptable and what isn't.

In some rare cases it can be necessary to use private discussions (if my mother where to die, I may not want the whole world to know and come up with condolences) - but it's necessary to keep it minimal, and to debrief as much as possible on the mailing-list afterwards.

In cases where someone is just too shy to talk about a work issue he has (for example, let's say if he feels that somebody else just keeps attacking all his ideas and nobody reacted so far), it's important to make sure he goes and discusses the issue openly. The temptation is big to keep it private and just take care of it with the other person - but then the community misses an opportunity to assess what is the appropriate behaviour in such cases between members of the community, and it creates gossip and politics.

The community can be a big help to face such situations, and we need our members to understand this.