bonus points if they think that your connection is lagging

but that just opens the worrying space more: what if you turned the camera back on and there it was? isn’t it better to not know? 🙃

who knows if it makes me look better or like a weirdo…

both. I’ve recently realized that during our 1on1 calls my boss is “looking at me”, which always made me feel more listened, overall better.

I mentioned that on a different, informal call, like, “are you using some tricks…” and he told us he’s doing no tricks, it’s just that the camera happens to be close enough to the screen where he places the call window, and that’s a laptop which is far enough that the angular difference is negligent. So that made him look better.

(And I think it’s even better than looking at the camera; he was kinda looking at both, me & the camera.)

But I suspect that this can bite back quickly if you’re in a meeting with several people and say, for a minute you (say, Alex) are exchanging ideas with one person, say, Bob while others (Cathy, Dan) are listening. The weird part is that in Bob, Cathy and Dan’s visual experience you’re directly looking at them, which will seem natural to Bob, but strange to to Cathy and Dan since they know you’re talking to Bob right now so why the heck you keep peeking at them for so long, as if you want them to jump in to the convo or something…

If the situation was similar as I’ve described for my boss (smaller screen, further away), then it can even be affected by the way Cathy and Dan’s videos are arranged on your screen. Not all are going to be closest to the camera, only the closest one to the camera could feel an eye contact, but that’s not going to change according to who you are talking to. (There could be some technology or call UI design to help with that…)

Overall, I think with some video-calling experience people will generally adapt for the situation over time, but it may differ individually…

From where their eyes are pointing I can only tell whether or not they’re looking at the camera, but if they are looking elsewhere, I have no way of knowing if that other place is my face or theirs or anything else (even outside scope of the talk – it could be a bug crawling on their desk for all I know).

funny how lot of comments are saying “i also look at my face while other person is talking”

what I meant when I was writing this post: looking at my face while I was talking.

…on second thought, I’m not sure, I might as well just be looking at myself 100% time.

I just love looking at myself I think I’m great haha I also like to make sure that my facial expressions are matching my inside emotions …a lot of the time they are and I like the reassurance of that… I also like to practice facial expressions and then look at myself to make sure I’m executing them correctly. But mostly I just like my face and what it does haha

… -agen.

I would not say “not believe too much in your efforts”, I think the tendency to simply scale down enthusiasm can be toxic in its own way.

I like to remind myself of how Václav Havel said it:

Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.

Yes, being enthusiastic about false goals can lead to devastating results. Being hopeful by realizing that your work does make sense even if you won’t necessarily see results of it, that’s much more sustainable source of motivation.

Also, remember that no matter how it turns out you will learn something on the path. If anything, this is one of the “certain” parts.

you mean this guy, right?

Thing is, trying to do a complete swap, there’s a point when the thought experiment kinda eats itself: you end up with a universe which is exactly the same, except the words “proton” and “neutron” are swapped.

The logic of it is fascinating in itself.

Isn’t it kind of what Liberapay is doing?

Maybe I’m missing the point, but if you want to have union of maintainers/contributors, please go ahead, just be careful with assuming it can actually address the problem. You will never have any substantial percentage of maintainers. That’s kind of the main point of FLOSS: people do what they want to do, where they want to do.

If you want to collect data about what is used – with the goal of “not forgetting the little project with the library”, that’s also great but that’s going to be a lot of work and might be impossible to reflect. I can’t think about solution that would not be platform-specific.

Don’t get me wrong, uniting FLOSS developers along common goals, technology domains or philosophy, building communities and providing support systems is an absolute wonderful thing to do, even if you end up having what might feel like just a few projects.