Re: Design in the open

[Allan Day <allanpday gmail com>]

On Wed, Apr 25, 2012 at 9:55 AM, John Stowers
<john stowers lists gmail com> wrote:
>
>>
>> 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.

I'm not sure how useful logging the channel will be (lots of noise,
etc), but I'd be happy to give it a go. The main thing is that we
shouldn't stop there. IRC logs aren't going to fix the whole gamut of
challenges that we face in relation to community design.

> You can even be proactive and send email updates to ddl or
> something.

I've lapsed in my design update blog posts, but I've got a new one in
the works. You think emails would be better than blogging?

> 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?
>

Trust them, or ask them, or a combination of the two. (Trust comes
best once you gain experience of working with people, of course.)

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