Re: On the Interaction with the design team

[Frederic Crozat <fred crozat net>]

On Mon, Jun 6, 2011 at 2:42 PM, Allan Day <allanpday gmail com> wrote:
> Dave Neary wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> Emmanuele Bassi wrote:
>> > can you please explain to me, in a short sentence, what do you want to
>> > achieve? not how, but precisely what.
>>
>> I have said that already: I want to enable the design team to work
>> productively with the entire GNOME development community.
>>
>> Right now a small number of designers are working effectively with a
>> small number of developers, and I've observed increasing discontent
>> among developers not on the inside.
>
> This is something that we're all committed to improving. I honestly
> think it's largely a problem of perception, but it's still a problem.
>
>> > do you have *specific* issues related to you (sorry, no "the community
>> > might feel" or "there have been rumors" or "people can misunderstand")?
>>
>> Yes. *I* was annoyed by the recent Deja Dup discussion, and felt that
>> the developer got short-changed at the end of the day. I was very
>> annoyed at the "systemd as external dependency" discussion, and the
>> message that some people following along the "GNOME OS" meme sent to
>> developers on other platforms.
>
> There seems to be some confusion here. Frankly, I have no idea what the
> design team has to do with either the Deja Dup or systemd discussions. I
> only ever received positive comments about having GNOME Backup from our
> designers. As for GNOME OS, though members of our designers are involved
> in some related work (all in the open: see [1]), I wouldn't say that the
> team is a driving force behind that initiative (though I'm pretty sure
> they all think it's a good idea).

I'm sorry but "GNOME OS" is a very good example of how "interaction
between design team and GNOME community" is failing :
- there has been no communication with the community since William
presentation at latest GUADEC and the associated blog post (
http://blogs.gnome.org/mccann/2010/08/01/shell-yes/ )
- it seems people working on "GNOME OS" have a different definition of
what is "an OS", "a distribution", etc.., which has not been discussed
nor even published somewhere publicly (and if you don't even agree on
definitions, cooperation is even more difficult).
- saying "design is done in the open" by just giving the 7
"whiteboards" list is not what I call "open design". Moreover, some of
those pages can be extremely incomplete ( see
-- https://live.gnome.org/GnomeOS/Design/Whiteboards/SoftwareUpdates
for instance which lacks any rationale and doesn't seem to leverage
user experience from people on other OS).

As somebody who has been active for years as a GNOME "packager", it is
becoming impossible to monitor what design changes are coming and
bring feedback based on my experience from interacting with users.
-- 
Frederic Crozat