Re: IRC channels in gnome development

[Allan Day <allanpday gmail com>]

Hey Andy,

Andy Wingo wrote: 
> Hi Alan,
> 
> FWIW I mostly like GNOME 3, so I don't want to pile on the flamefest.
> But this bothered me:
> 
> On Sun 06 Feb 2011 15:27, Allan Day <allanpday gmail com> writes:
> 
> > Even if you had records of every discussion, you wouldn't get the
> > information you're looking for. Design decisions don't get made
> > committee meeting style, and design involves a lot of specialist
> > background knowledge which doesn't get explicitly referenced. Fact is,
> > we'll probably never be able to give 100% of the rationale behind design
> > decisions.
> 
> The thing is, we've done mostly well in the programming department.  If
> the subtext is this is the case for design in contrast to programming, I
> would like to disagree; that would be unjust both to programming and to
> design.
> 
> Often programming is just as solitary an affair, yet we manage to
> communicate in such a way that enables collaboration; 
> surely
> programmers are not more socially competent than designers ;-)
>
> Likewise designers don't work alone.  I'm sure you have been one of two
> or three or six designers sitting at a table hashing things out.  In
> neither profession do things happen "committee meeting style" -- when
> things go well, of course! -- but there is collaboration.

Sure, designers communicate and collaborate. And of course we need to
make an effort to ensure that our communications are accessible to
others.

> This characterization of design also neglects the great community design
> work that has been done recently by Máirín, for example, and done to an
> extent within GNOME.

I'm not as familiar with Máirín's work as I should be. It's fair to say
that experiments in community design have had mixed results, though:
Papercuts is an obvious success, but the Ayatana list isn't a productive
place and UX Advocates is dead. (I'm not sure how Mozilla's efforts have
worked out...)

> Finally, it's rare that a programmer never does design work, or for a
> designer never to code at all. 

Totally agree: 'designer' and 'developer' aren't mutually exclusive
categories.

> We all need pointers and records to
> figure out how things are done.  Of course it's not always possible!

That's what the HIG is for, though I do think we can do more to keep
people abreast of new developments.

> But it would be an error not to hold transparency up as a goal, IMO.

The question, I think, is what role we imagine transparency to perform.
If it's to inform and to make the community feel that it's a part of
GNOME design, then I am all for it. What I'm skeptical about is the idea
of transparency for the purposes of accountability.

> > It simply isn't true to say that we haven't made an effort to explain
> > what we're doing. I explained many of the design considerations in my
> > blog post [1] on this subject, and I did that precisely because I wanted
> > to help people to be informed.
> 
> For this, and all your awesome work, thank you!

Thanks. :)

Allan
-- 
Blog: http://afaikblog.wordpress.com/
IRC: aday on irc.gnome.org