Re: Module Proposal: Zeitgeist

[Sriram Ramkrishna <sri ramkrishna me>]

On Sun, Apr 22, 2012 at 9:21 AM, Florian Max <florian muellner gmail com> wrote:

On Sun, Apr 22, 2012 at 4:27 PM, Emily Gonyer <emilyyrose gmail com> wrote:

Then the design team ought to be more open about what exactly 'their' vision for gnome is, as well as open to other ideas/concepts. Insisting on doing things their way, while being extremely vague as to what exactly their way *is* is not helpful to the rest of the community who is trying to get stuff done.

First: the design team is very much trying to get stuff done, just like the "rest of the community". In fact, the design team is incredibly small (ergo: overworked). We have an extremely ambitious goal of creating an operating system, with just a handful of people doing design work towards that goal - compare that to the resources the likes of Apple or Microsoft put into their products to get an idea of the workload our folks have. I certainly have seen maintainers asking for design help on #gnome-design being turned down because no designer had any time to spend on yet-another-module.

I think we have a bit of a problem.  Our core team has gotten smaller and thus overworked.  Because of that they don't have that kind of time to do community management.  I would even say that some of you are kinda grumpy. :-)

We really need to grow the number of good quality coders.  Things like creating a lower bar of entry to code on GNOME is one aspect of an overall problem of getting new blood.  It's why we have a perception of companies running the joint rather than a community.

GNOME as a project needs to concentrate on bringing in new volunteers so that we can expand the core team.

Which brings us to the matter of openness: the results of everything the design team does ends up on the GNOME wiki under live.gnome.org/Design. Of course it would be really fancy if the wiki also contained the reasoning behind decisions, but let's face it -

Shaun opened up a new thread on this, I will pen my thoughts there.

Great thoughts, Florian.  Thanks.
sri