Re: On the Interaction with the design team

[Allan Day <allanpday gmail com>]

Frederic Crozat wrote:
> 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).

You are missing my point - GNOME OS is *not* a design initiative. There
is some work going on under the design banner, but GNOME OS did not
originate in GNOME design. Most of the design team don't know any more
about GNOME OS than you do (or if they do, they're not telling me ;) ).

I agree that it would be good to have more communications about GNOME
OS, but that isn't the responsibility of the design team. You'll need to
complain to someone else about this one, I'm afraid.

> - 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).

Fair point. We need to document more. Don't think anyone disagrees with
that.

> 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.

You'll need to be more specific. You want to be able to participate in
design work? How did you do this monitoring and feedback previously?

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