Re: Rules for design in Gnome

[Tomeu Vizoso <tomeu sugarlabs org>]

On Tue, Apr 24, 2012 at 15:10, Alberto Ruiz <aruiz gnome org> wrote:
> I would like to take a moment to make a reflection.
>
> Maintainers only get to decide what's done in their modules back then when
> GNOME was organized in a maintainer centric fashion. However with 3.0 we
> have moved towards a model where yet another force is included in the
> decision making process, that is, the design team. So far they have done a
> huge amount of good quality work, GNOME 3.0 wouldn't be what it is without
> them and without this approach.
>
> You don't find many open source communities where a pipeline for design
> driven development is implemented, in fact, very few companies implement
> this either. I think we should embrace this concept. I think giving ALL the
> decision making power to the maintainers is a bad idea, in fact I think it's
> harming to do so.

I'm afraid that interfering in the maintainer's responsibilities is a
very big can of worms, more likely to do harm than good. There's
something powerful in how a maintainer feels responsible about his
module and the community that surrounds it.

Instead, what if maintainers keep having the last word on individual
decisions, including those disagreeing with the design team, but have
the formal duty of cooperating with the design team?

That way, if a module is consistently ignoring the design team and
delivering generally-perceived bad UX, the maintainer can be asked to
reconsider her stance and maybe eventually replaced by someone else.

I believe that maintainer removal may not be needed ever, in the same
way that, to my knowledge, no maintainer has been stripped yet from
her responsibilities because of not respecting the freezes, reviewing
patches, breaking the code of conduct, etc.

Regards,

Tomeu