Re: On the Interaction with the design team

[William Jon McCann <william jon mccann gmail com>]

Hi,

On Wed, Jun 1, 2011 at 10:05 AM, Johannes Schmid <jhs jsschmid de> wrote:
> Hi!
>
>> On 1 June 2011 12:57, Matthias Clasen <matthias clasen gmail com> wrote:
>>> Basically, mailing lists don't work for many kinds of productive
>>> discussion.
>>
>> Agreed. In my recent discussions with the dudes in #gnome-design there
>> was a flurry of messages, perhaps as many as 200 back-and-forth
>> discussions per hour. In that same hour, we iterated about 20
>> screenshots and quite a few designers piled in with suggestions.
>>
>> You just can't get that kind of latency and interest level with a mailing
>> list.
>
> So what about those people who simply don't have the time to hang around
> on IRC because of various reasons. Many volunteers have only time to work
> on weekends or in the afternoon and are spread over various timezones. IRC
> is an anti-pattern there as you are excluding all these people.

Are they listening or participating? Transparency and reporting is
pretty simple to solve. Publish logs, document (wiki), and blog and
you're pretty much there.  Participation and engagement is much
harder. Basically you need to find a way to build a relationship with
a designer.  It doesn't have to be on IRC. IRC is just one of the ways
people actively working on the design of the GNOME core are
communicating. Google docs, git, sparkleshare, and IM are others.

Dealing with timezones and distance is a challenge. No doubt about
that. It is a problem even in our own team. However, once a
relationship has been established (trust, respect, and understanding)
it is much easier to surmount. It is most problematic when building
new relationships. My advice to people who want to become involved is
to be clever and find another way to build those relationships. Many
have.

This could mean picking something that is close at hand and making it
awesome and telling the world about it. Or even making something
yourself. It often turns out to be much more effective than just
showing up on IRC and saying - "hi, what can I do?"

No one is excluding you. Don't ask for permission - go ahead, do
something great and let the world know about it.

Jon