Re: Openness (Was: Re: Module Proposal: Zeitgeist)

[Sriram Ramkrishna <sri ramkrishna me>]

On Sun, Apr 22, 2012 at 1:06 PM, Seif Lotfy <seif lotfy com> wrote:

On Sun, Apr 22, 2012 at 6:36 PM, Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org> wrote:
> On Sun, 2012-04-22 at 18:21 +0200, Florian Max wrote:
>
>> 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.
>
> I think people are more concerned about being able to have input
> on the process, not on seeing the results published on the wiki.
> I'm on #gnome-design all day. I often skim the backlog. I don't
> really see the discussion that leads to the results. Sometimes
> I see mention of meetings. I don't know where those meetings
> happen.

Exactly. Non-designers want to be part of the process. Reasons behind
decisions need to be written somewhere, but that is not enough.

If a new a developer comes and asks for reasons behind a decisions, I
doubt that the designers, who are already as busy as it gets, can take
time to explain each one who comes over what problem is being solved
via the design and how.
So having design decisions and their reasoning documented would help.
But also as designers it is their responsibility to communicate with
those who still doubt these decisions, starting with those willing to
implement or help out directly. Because if they can explain to those
nearest to them, those can then jump in to help others.

No, you get volunteer community managers to communicate those design decisions.  A community manager should be able to get a general feel of what design decisions are having issues with the community.  At some point maybe sucha person can opt for a conversation with specific individuals but otherwise you know there are a lot of unreasonable people out here and the internet makes them more unreasonable than they would be usually.

Luckily for us, we do have a number of people who couldu do that kind of community management, Olav for one has already been doing some of it.   I do it more externally.

Big projects like Mozilla have a community managers.  It's definitely something this project should do more of.
 

sri