Re: Design in the open

[Emily Gonyer <emilyyrose gmail com>]

As someone who is just starting to become involved in design & development after many years of using open source & free software, I find these discussions fascinating on multiple levels. For whatever reason I have always found communities in free/open source software to be rather intimidating, which is probably why its taken me so long to become involved. I suspect this is true for many people, and I fully support anything and everything that makes it easier for people to become involved and thereby feel connected to the project.

The article was definitely interesting and as I think about it more and more, I can certainly see how developing a 'planning language' would be helpful to GNOME. With that in mind, I suspect a first step would be to start a wiki page of GNOME Design Terms, with a list of terms and their (community-defined) definitions in relation to GNOME Design. Examples can be added as development proceeds, until we end up with a wiki page explaining our 'planning language' which we can point new people to when they are becoming involved. Such a page/language would certainly streamline and simplify the design process, and allow new (potential) contributors to write proposals and suggestions in a way that makes it easier for everyone to understand and critique them.

Another idea would be to begin giving users a simple way to provide feedback on what they prefer in design. This could be done via a GNOME Design Blog or similar, where posts focus on upcoming features along with examples to be voted on – do users prefer buttons/menus/etc that look like X, Y, or Z? Should we remove minimize/maximize/close buttons? Do users want a journal? How important is privacy to you? Etc. Require users to register, and when they do so ask if they'd like to sign up for a (weekly? monthly?) news letter regarding the ongoing development of GNOME and related technologies/applications, as well as new polls, blog posts, etc. Essentially, create a new level of GNOME membership, below the Foundation level, with a much lower bar for inclusion – require only a name and a (verified) email address – and allow almost anyone to participate in the ongoing discussions and development of GNOME. 

Emily

On Fri, May 4, 2012 at 1:03 AM, Diego Escalante Urrelo <diegoe gnome org> wrote:

On Thu, May 3, 2012 at 5:19 PM, Federico Mena Quintero
<federico gnome org> wrote:
>
> As a way to solve these issues, I'd like to follow up on an idea which I
> sketched during last year's Desktop Summit - namely, about constructing
> a pattern language for Gnome's design based on the good things that what
> we have and what other systems have done well.

This. +1.

>From my experience on film stuff, having a way to refer to "those
things that look good or bad" is essential to have collaboration
between different specialists.

Framing shots would be impossible if there wasn't an abstract way of
describing them (flat/deep, warm/cold, lenses, etc).

Sound designers/editors, photography directors, even actors, need to
be aware of this language for efficient communication during
production.

I have been thinking lately that film making has many similarities
with Free Software development. Being both abstract things with an
audiovisual result that involves many different specialists.

A common language of patterns is an awesome idea. I'd encourage
Federico to expand on the subject.

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