Sorry to burst your bubble Nate but politics is _not_ about solving problems together. Politics is about POWER, pure and simple. The only time politicians _seem_ to work together across the political boundry is due to self-interest. The majority of the time, they’ll be spending their time actively sabotaging their opponents’ “good” works in an attempt to gain both political and popular favour.

Anyway, it is interesting to note that the Alt.NET community is able to fill a void that official Microsoft cannot. MS can’t afford to strongly enforce their opinions because that could potentially isolate consumers. But Alt.NET is able to be loud voices that can show the ways of approaching software engineering. So really Alt.NET complements Reg.NET very well.

We have to be careful that as we move the civility dial toward the center that we also keep the opinion going and always favor learning and improvement over placation and indifference.

That last part is what makes things a little hot sometimes. Like most things human and group psychology, we’re playing by a law of averages and it’s important to keep that in mind.

“[Group/Big Company] has a public relations problem. We are a loose-knit group, and so we don’t have a single voice. Many of us disagree with each other. We also have a lot of passionate people in our ranks, and sometimes passionate people aren’t tactful in the way they approach a problem. These are all detriments to [Group/Big Company]‘s image, but benefits to the group as a whole — everyone is encouraged to speak and be heard.”

Know what I’m getting at? :):)

“In case you don’t read any blogs or follow any .NET developers on Twitter, Oxite is a new open-source CMS recently released by Microsoft.”

Microsoft has not released anything. It’s a bunch of guys that work at Microsoft.