Re: IRC channels in gnome development

["Jason D. Clinton" <me jasonclinton com>]

On Sat, Feb 5, 2011 at 13:43, Maciej Piechotka <uzytkownik2 gmail com> wrote:
> While it might be a stretch analogy but some people argue in various
> companies (not every company and it may be argued how good the policy
> is) to open the discussion/design process to community (I think I heard
> about Dell, Starbucks and others). Of course it is company who plays the
> role of beneficial dictator in this model nonetheless the consumers may
> be proven to be valuable source of feedback and ideas (even if the need
> to be filtered out).

You characterized the situation with the power manager as a "crisis"
and yet, while your description is more than a little hyperbolic, that
situation demonstrates that precisely what you are asking for is not
productive. There were a total of four blog posts on the topic and
approximately 200 comments posted to those. There wasn't any negative
feedback on any of those four post's comments that was well researched
or particularly informed about all the issues that need to be
considered. Even people who tried to offer alternatives didn't seem
particularly informed about common use cases or what other operating
systems are doing (all research that had previously been done by the
design team). There was some legitimate concerns expressed,
particularly about why the research shows that AC and on-battery are
the same situation, but that was a tiny minority of the feedback and
not surprisingly, a large majority of this informed discussion
happened on IRC in #gnome-os and #fedora-desktop--not on a mailing
list or blog.

Design is a process which anyone is welcome to get involved in by way
of researched proposals, mock-ups, or use-case studies. But asking the
design team to post every decision that they make to d-d-l so that
they can have the opportunity to be stop-energy-ed by community
members who haven't researched or considered the situation, would not
be productive.

That isn't to say that more wiki documentation couldn't help.
Specifically, I need some more documentation to make one of the
marketing videos that are upcoming. But I'm not asking for that
information so that I can argue about it--I'm not on the design team.