@u7angel
yes, I obviously agree: in that thread I was indeed trying to point out that new users are missing the shipped tutorial library. Including it in leaf menu didn’t solve the issue, either; in case, it just made a dent on it, because there are so much info in there, that the link can get lost.
On the other hand, if we don’t have a menu bar…
// not political correct, and might include trigger warnings or micro agressions
Should the name be change for usability proposes? Yes
Should the name be changed do the fact that this can offend someone ? NO, its my opinion.
I made a long post before, and I erase/modify it due to the risk of being offensive or cause a trigger on someone else.This need to stop. This feeling of not being able to say/write something because someone could be offended can´t reach vvvv community.
Girlpower were called NWA “NerdzWithAbilities,”… I wouldn’t be ‘offended.’ “Check out the NWA folder for…” is something I could imagine telling folks so they can find the an amazing 3d UI example. I would understand the vibe and the humour, if a little riske. But it would still be a bit awkward showing the software to my brother or sister and having being asked to what it stands for.
They’ll know the reference. They’ll get the joke, but it’ll be acknowledged mutely. Maybe with a smirk if they think I want them to ellicit a positive reaction. But they also won’t be ‘offended.’ They won’t come online here to shout their outrage; they won’t lobby for legislation calling for the removal of or instances of the accronym “NWA” from public life for fear it will “undermine identity;” No-one will email Ice Cube and ask him to do tipping him off about trademark infringement. But they’d wonder who this community is and whether they want to be part of it. And perhaps decide to check out OpenFrameworks (I’m joking of course, but Touch Designer…).
Sometimes, being equal means to not have a big deal made about your “special” difference in places that it shouldn’t be a big deal.
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Kind of feels like this thread has been derailed into pretty emotional discussion, that somewhat misses the point.
Honest question I’ve been asking myself for a while: what exactly is the joke behind that name? Is it just “lol random”? While other namings like Boygrouping & DeNiro somewhat make sense (and I guess are well liked), the reasoning behind Girlpower never clicked for me,
@dennis @mburk since you asked, 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. now, what i have no exact recollection of, is how the term became the name of a folder for vvvvs demo patches. it was probably rather random…having the name in vvvv somewhere seemed smart enough to avoid (not actually) anticipated criticism.
indeed i think this “background info” was never printed anywhere, but i guess whoever asked about it got this as an answer and done. joke? political statement? more a humble attempt in poetry…
did it worry us that it was not the best usability choice? apparently not. the thinking was more: it is such a strange name that people will rather likely look into it, to see what’s in it. win-win.
as for all your comments, my personal thoughts: thanks for a balanced discussion showing that different views and opinions can live side-by-side in our vvvvorld. we learned that a controversy built up around the term over the years. good. should we use that as a chance to confuse even unbiased future users of vvvv even more by changing the name of a folder that has been mentioned all over the wiki/forum/youtube-videos/blogs in reference for people to find help?
or can we turn this into a discussion to think about concrete ways of getting under-represented groups more represented in our community? because after all occurrences of the term “girlpower” have been rewritten in the univvvverse, not much would have happened in that respect, right?
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Great to see this informative discussion! I hope you don’t mind that we devvvvs step in that late, but it looks like open discussions work better if not biased from us.
And you might think: well, we know already what to expect, but as shown with rainbow midi files in an ASCII animated crack.exe, we sometimes are actually able to show that we appreciate and value your opinion, and also, there is no automatic vote within our team as well.
For me, this topic would allow showing that appreciation again and I would interpret the voices leaning towards a rename. In my personal opinion, I would also think that we’d not lose our legacy by doing so, we’d just make a legacy term [obsolete].
Practically speaking: we will be confronted with old forum entries and alike that make even less sense for newcomers, but if this can make us appear less nineties, I guess it is worth the hassle :D
I don’t like to see people being uneasy about something that can be easily changed, without losing anything really. And examples would be a pretty self-explanatory name, wouldn’t it? So yes, I’m in favor of that, but I would go for what the majority votes for.
Oh and there is another topic where our votes will be counted: sometimes it’s actually up to you guys: Editing Framework and DX11: Cursor issue
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I think you are right, since no one is answering anymore :)
@joreg your point that it was written a billion times all over the forum is actually a realy good one and I didn`t think about that before. One way to counter this a little bit after a possible rename would be to highlight the EXAMPLES folder on the download page and maybe also in the setup.exe as a note. Then at least no one can ask where such an folder can be found (and would not end up searching for it on the forum). But randomly reading about girlpower folder would be hard to avoid, yes. Then it becomes a mysterious thing actually
Thanks all for the discussion again.
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:
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:
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:
My earlier thoughts:
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:
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.
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- changing folder is rather easy of course (would need a small go through each patch to see nothing is broken)
- girlpower repository needs a name change (that’s normally ok in github, not sure how it works with forks)
- submodule needs updated url (either github handle that, either every fork is now broken).
So there’s a decent amount of unknown, and obviously in the case repository name break push/pulls that is a real nightmare, not wanting to do that.
It’s not a VL point, adding a menu in vvvv is really a trivial task, does not break “minimalism” (menu don’t take space when folded)
And since I’m super bored of the persistent devvvs “yeah but in vvvv blah blah [insert excuse here]” which will arrive as usual :
This is even easy to do so without 4v source code, as per the gif, so it’s not a “but in delphi/vvvv whatever” problem.
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we ain’t gonna see this ever in vanilla…
why not, if it’s so obvious simple to find
Bring on the hate and ranting, this gets us places …
Maybe it’s just me, but I’ve been under the impression for a while now, that there seems to be a separate part/faction of this community that sadly has given up on basic principles of politeness, that are driven by arrogance instead and like to reply with that sort of agitated and slightly bitchy tone.
I totally value what everyone contributes to this and has contributed in the past, and you absolutely have a point there.
But it really is not about opinions. It’s about how you try to convey those … it really makes me sad having to read these sort of comments for a while now.
Yes, we’re on the internet. There’s places where conversations seem to be held like this. But this is quite an intimate and not so much anonymous community … most of us know each other in person, and I doubt that an actual face-to-face conversation would be held like this … please everyone who may feel addressed, come to reason and try being polite again.
There’s reasons you still stick around (which I’m grateful for) even though you dislike certain parts, please don’t forget about those.
Maybe I’m a little oversensitive in this particular context, it’s probably because this has been going on for a while in blog post comments, chat messages, facebook posts and such … I don’t like this kind of development.
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the bad tone is there because during vvvv’s history interface changes requested by the community (like menu bar, title bar buttons (minimize, maximize, close), node-grid snapping, pin connection snapping, easing the use of IOBoxes etc etc) gets implemented very rarely in vvvv and the reasoning behind not implementing those are usually just “we don’t want to” or “this sets vvvv apart from the rest” and that can be frustrating for the Nth time.
Like I said, I get everyone’s point and even agree about parts of it, in terms of the actual meaning behind those posts.
But I don’t think this is the right way to address that, even for the Nth time.
+1 for the menu and +1 for politeness
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hello!
so, here’s an update on the issue:
After discussing this in detail we tried to come up with a solution that works for everybody. Everybody includes nostalgic folks, vimeo lovers, contributors, goys and birls alike, young and old.
We already noticed that we anyways need a user-friendly way of browsing examples and help patches for vvvv and VL. Let’s say we put that on the mid-term agenda and somehow actually achieve it. Be it a menu or a separate window.
Now the entry point for browsing help and example patches suddenly is this UI, not the windows explorer and thereby the folder name is less relevant. Let’s also state that this UI actually does not come with the term “girlpower”, but, actually, with the terms “help” and “examples”.
-> The term “girlpower” will just not show up that often anymore. Vimeo lovers watching some old workshop video will find the folder still. Nostalgic folks and contributors don’t need to adjust.
Secondly, we’ll support contributors that want to name their folder “examples”. We’ll just fetch examples from folders named “girlpower” and “examples” and show them in the to be developed UI. By that we allow contributors to design their future contributions in a new kind of way for which no video tutorials exist yet and therefore the risk of breaking documentation is non-existent.
-> The term “girlpower” will vanish at some point.
Is this a valid solution for everybody?
Yours, devvvvs
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Fine with me.
aye aye