Re: On the Interaction with the design team

[Xan Lopez <xan gnome org>]

On Mon, Jun 6, 2011 at 10:59 AM, Dave Neary <dneary gnome org> wrote:
> To sum it all up, I believe the current dynamic of the design team is doing damage to GNOME
> as a community.

I think what is really doing damage to the community is this kind of
hyperbolic accusation around the design team that seems to be in vogue
lately, to be honest. Not burning bridges with existing or potential
contributors is surely a noble goal, but not alienating your core
developers telling them that the fruit of their passion is damaging
the community certainly should be a no-brainer?

And my 2 cents: if GNOME 3.0 is the kind of result we get from this
"damage" I want more of it, not less.

> While the design team shouldn't have to "involved everyone" (and that's
> not what I'm asking for), they *should* involved everyone affected by
> design team decisions - and not to communicate the decisions, but to be
> sure that they've got the right question. And in the same way as a
> module maintainer can ask the release team to make decisions about the
> module, I'd like to see maintainers be able to approach the design team
> for help with their module.

I maintain a module and I haven't had any particular problem in
approaching the design team in the past when I felt the need to do so.

There's a difficult debate to be had about what powers a design team
can have in an environment like GNOME where nobody can force anybody
to do anything, and I'm sure having people concerned with transparency
and accountability will prove to be useful. What I don't think is
useful is to wildly exaggerate the current situation as some kind of
nightmare-ish design-driven gulag and blame all real and perceived
problems on a bunch of people meeting on an IRC channel who in the end
have no more power than the suggestions they can make to the module
developers.

It's fine to feel that the "those who show up and do the work get to
decide" cavalier attitude some gnome people have is not very fair, but
I think this problem is neither new nor constrained to design. We have
worked like this for decades, we have shipped our best and worst
working like that. If you want to improve things be my guest, but
let's start by not alienating the people that "show up and do the
work" because we need them the most.

Xan