I enjoyed your discussion, mostly agree with Hugo Roy and won't repeat arguments.
Sam Liddicott wrote :
And this question: Which is your target audience?
- Evangelist => strategic document like this message
- Idealist => "Like the Why I rejected your attachment" link you posted
- Pragmatist => How to communicate: A view of interoperability
- Minimalist => Simple etiquette: How to stop your correspondents
complaining
I'm sorry but I don't think this is helpful. You can't come and start classiying people in groups and thinking you know everybody is one of those patterns and you just have to decide what to tell them in order to manipulate them to achieve your goals. That shows, and creates the same kind of rejection advertisement causes. You should just say what you have to say, try to make it true, understandable and coherent, and to summarize what's in it the best you can when you point someone to it, and let people, in their knowledge and diversity do what they want/can with it. If you think you are what you call an evangelist, then write a document about what an evagenlist can tell others to help them understand things. Not a document about what an evagelist should know, and much less about what an idealist, pragmatist or minimalist should know. Assuming they exist, you don't know what they need, you only know what you have to offer: offer it.
The rest of this mail is more general and likely offtopic, or at least too long for the small portion on topic, so anyone reading furhter has been warned.
I just wanted to give my opinion that I think you (maybe Sam, but possibly more other people than intersect in part in this attitude) are very eager to understand people and adapt to them in order to be effective in what you try to achieve. For me this has 2 problems:
- you assume an undestanding of people you often don't have, so your models of the people you interact with are too weak for the confidence you put in them. The only person you can aspire to really know is yourself, so offering (never imposing) your views and knowledge to others is often a safer bet than adapting to the views or knowledge you think others have. They can think for themselves, so they'll pick what they can use from what you tell them better than you can pick it for them. If they don't believe all you say or do all you tell them it's not your failure, it's their judgement.
- you assume people are static (or you care for an interval short enough to ignore people evolution during it). Since you care about the present situation and want some result from your interaction, or some present success you adapt to the present state. This may give better results now but it may give worse results in the long run. Sometimes you tell something to someone with the utmost care to help her understand what you think and why you do what you do, or are what you are, or think it is best also for her to do so, and she just thinks you are crazy and moves along. But then she lives on, gets other inputs and maybe the fifth person she finds with similar views makes her change her mind in a way that wouldn't have been possible if that was her first time hearing it, i.e. if everybody had always adapted too much to her.
An example:
I myself know nothing about food, for instance. I use it every day but I'm bad at cooking and not a gourmet at all, nor knowledgeable in dietetics. More or less like many people are with computer science. Yet I have vegetarian friends which are in the process of maybe convincing me to leave meat. The first time I found one I thought it was unpractical, likely unhealthy, odd and made no sense. The first arguments I didn't buy (poor animals? why should I care more for a life form that -like me- eats other life forms than for a purer life form that builds life out of dead matter and raw energy? poor vegetables !). I was unconvenienced to find restaurants with more diverse meals apt for my accompanying vegetarians, or having to eat things I wouldn't have tried if I wasn't at their home but I now appreciate the meals I've discovered I like , the habit of looking at the menu before going into a restaurant and the later arguments (the one about energy cost of producing meat instead of vegetables has quite convinced me).
If every vegetarian had adapted to me and offered me only the vegetable dishes I already liked, or come with me to the first restaurant and eating what they could I would probably not have learnt things I like having learnt. So I thank them for being a little nuisance.
I may be regarded as an idealist, inflexible, antisocial or whatever, but I think the anti-social attitude is that of only pretending to go with the flow and accomodating others instead of sharing your knowledge and contributing what you can to your society (and letting others ignore you if they will). Showing yourself, teaching others to do what you think is right (and why) and letting others ignore you or disagree is not being stubborn or misantropist, it's being honest and confident in the intelligence of others. And I may have no proof of that intelligence, but I have no reason to think intelligence is not uniformly distributed, and anyway, if people are stupid there's no solution, so let's handle the other case.
And I think it's perfectly fine to mix political and practical advice in any text. What use is knowing how to do something if you don't know why you should do it or what would the world get out of it ? What use is knowing what needs fixing in this world without knowing how to fix it?
But I agree we should not lead anyone to deception if we can help it. Saying that all software works with all standards is not helpful. Saying that it's best to choose any program that works with standards and asking your peers to do so will help society including the person you're telling it and you can tell them this will possibly involve more effort for more reward than what they're doing. But it is also important to let them understand what doesn't work in their current practices, because they may not know that not everybody uses their same program and version, or that their message is being silently lost.
A few times when I've complained of email attachments to the sender other people that didn't complain initially have told that they weren't able to access them either. Sometimes even all people adressed were not reading the attachment and the sender kept thinking they did. Many did not know the problem was the sender's choice of format, so they didn't complain, it was simply too difficult to tell what was happening when something in their computer didn't work.
Sorry to waste your time with my ramblings.