Re: Design in the open

[John Stowers <john stowers lists gmail com>]

> 
> So there are lots of ways that we can do design better as a community,
> and contributors on this list can all play a part in helping to make
> us to be even more successful in this regard. It will take actions as
> well as words to move forward, of course - if you want to help, or
> have your own ideas, just get in touch.

Many of your suggestions seem designed to address or avoid conflict, or
to convey design team decisions in a better manner. This is not the
source of my confusion nor my uncertainty in how to interact with the
design team.

In order to piece together the rationale or even the process for design
team decisions I currently browse commit logs on the gnome-design github
repo, and look at comments made when changing live.gnome.org pages. Some
of you tweet stuff, others scatter it on google+. You suggest even using
$some_new_webapp to better collaborate on designs.

While I cannot see the discussion and the evolution of design team
thought (even if I have the time to piece together all these sources of
information) all I see is a decision by decree when a live.gnome.org
page is created which describes the final design.

My suggestion is thus the same as it was the last time this thread was
raised - if the design team does not want to archive discussions on a
mailing list, may they please allow IRC logging on the gnome-design
channel. You can even be proactive and send email updates to ddl or
something.

Of course if the canonical way to interact with the design is to show up
on IRC at a specific hour then, IMO, you will lose contributors. I can
hack any time of night when I have the motivation and the free time. But
if I want to understand why the design team did something I have to...
trust them?

John