Girlpower folder

[jerry]

Since I’m relatively new to vvvv I thought it might be valuable to add my thoughts to the discussion from the perspective of a beginner.

I only came across the thread yesterday. I found it highly interesting since I was confused by the naming of the folder as well. I wanted to know more and was close to writing a post myself. What was confusing me is the following question:

@mburk

Is it a political statement, a joke or something completely else?

As you recognised in this discussion depending on the answer, it creates very different perspectives on vvvv and reactions to it.

I’m glad @joreg explained the history of this since it answers the question:

@joreg

here my recollection from ~17 years ago: we came up with this idea for a client/server render-system built into vvvv while pop music around us was dominated by the weird phenomenon of casting-bands. one of the more popular boygroups was called “n sync” and it struck us that their synchronous dancing somehow resembles the idea of our networked rendering system which thus got a fancy name. it then felt uneasy with such a name to seemingly burn a gender-bias into our software, but luckily pop also had a ready answer here: the term “girlpower” seemed like a good fit to create a balance, if just by its sound.

So it was meant to be a political statement about equality. Good on you! But I think it’s tough to click on this as a beginner with no context in 2018 in my opinion.

Before suggesting some ideas, I would also like to show what this discussion did to me and what those obstacles can do to new users. I’m just going to quote myself from this Vvvv ecosystem and design thread. Sorry for hijacking this thread a bit, but I feel the reasons and solutions are related:

@jerry

I spent some time today reading the whole Girlpower folder thread. It was great to get an image of the different opinions and attitudes within the community. It showed me, that there are a lot of open-minded people caring about beginners. But also the opposite is present which confirms some of my earlier thoughts on why and how vvvv is hard to access for beginners.

My earlier thoughts:

@jerry

As I sometimes find it hard to understand the reasoning behind vvvvs design (ecosystem and UI) I tried to have a few conversations with more experienced vvvv users in person. The answer I usually got was something like: “Everything in vvvv is designed to be like that on purpose. It’s perfect.” Or, “Don’t know. Just deal with it. It’s never going to change.” It sounded like there is not much of an open ear for suggestions and improvements regarding the general design of vvvv and its ecosystem in the vvvv community.

Stepping into vvvv felt a lot harder to me than other tools. As a newbie, I was laughing a bit about some of the jokes. On others, I didn’t click and was left alone. Those things put me off a couple of times before trying to dive into vvvv again. It felt like a locked-up community that’s hard to approach. The reality is different, I learned to ask heaps on the forum and got great responses. But I’ve only done that after eying and playing with the software for a few years and making sure I’m not the only one who is too dumb to understand.

If you want new people to love vvvv you should be less vague and more explicit about your and its intentions in my opinion.

So here is my suggestion to make sure no one even gets negative impressions similar to mine:

@jerry

I think it would help to write some kind of mission statement / code of conduct / manifesto or guideline (my English is probably not good enough to nail the terminology, but I hope you get the idea). Having a clear vision of what vvvv is supposed to be, how decisions are made, what its strengths are and where it sucks [there is generally room for improvement in everything], what the social environment of the community should look like and what everyone can expect from each other (devvvvs, community, contributors, …) can really help to have meaningful discussions and make quick decisions while always referring back to those documents.
Writing these documents can be a tedious process and is hard to realise or can even put some people off. I think it’s well worth it though. I reckon start with only a few sentences everyone […] can agree with and then extend it to something bigger over time.

Considering the long history of vvvv, it’s hard for me to imagine this has never been discussed before, and I’m surprised not to find any info on this on the website easily. I feel silly for bringing the topic up as a newbie as I might repeat what was said a bunch of times before. If something like that exists somewhere, I would be happy if someone pointed me towards it.

I would also like to suggest writing a page about the history of vvvv. Include those remarkable stories like the one by @joreg explaining why things are designed in that way even if the design changes. (I know about the page on the MESO website. It’s cool, but not part of the vvvv website). Those stories are fascinating and will make it much easier for new people to relate to the vibe of the vvvv community.

Generally please don’t get stuck with legacies. Everything would only become harder in the future. If you feel a change is necessary do it as soon as possible.
If you end up renaming the girlpower folder, I suggest adding a script to the website that dynamically annotates the word girlpower on all pages or posts explaining that it’s been renamed. The annotation can be subtle too. That should prevent people from being confused. (Furthermore, that script could annotate other words which are part of the glossary to make it even easier for beginners.)

Sorry, this is more than I intended to write.