Re: GNOME Project Organogram

["Thilo Pfennig" <tpfennig gmail com>]

On 2/11/07, Quim Gil <quimgil gmail com> wrote:

> However, while GNOME is Code the community is realizing that GNOME is
> People (yes, that meme) as well. I would draw perhaps a bi-polar
> structure with the release team & developers in one side, and the
> board & membership of the GNOME Foundation in another side, having
> around the respective teams/areas.

Maybe there is no ONE view - and this can be seen as one possible
view. Maybe there should be more than one organigram that can be
discussed?

Besides the organisational view I think what is really missing are
what I see as the most important part of the GNOME: The users! One
might think that without any hackers there would be no GNOME - but
really without the users all this code would be for nothing. Maybe
users are taken for granted today? But I really think that users are
more important and that they are not really mentioned as part of the
project gives a view of how GNOME views itself. Users appear as guests
on the web pages - as a topic for the usability team and also as a
target group for the marketing team.

> From some perspective GNOME sometimes looks exactly like that - as a
user you sometimes feel splitted like the teans. One like some views,
sometimes the usability, sometimes the application. So one meets
different aspects but feels that GNOME does not really focus on the
user. It focuses on usability, localisation, new users, exciting
applications - but the user itself plays no role. I know - many might
indicate that the user is included in all that - but what i mean is
that if we primarily organize in teams with different focus the user
itself gets out of focus, while her needs get different levels of
attention.

This is one of the main reasons why the desktop experience is often
still frustrating and
why some problems exist for just too many years without solution or
with anybody taking of the problems. Often these are bugs or problems
that need attention from different teams or even organisations (or
even hardware vendors).

The system GNOME (not the organisation) sure had to include the
distributions and software companies with all different projects. So
what happens to bring GNOME to the user or when a user reports a bug
is a much bigger issue and much more complicated. Companies like
Fluendo are also part of the GNOME system without beeing a GNOME team
inside the organisation.


Thilo
--
Blog: http://vinci.wordpress.com
Linked In: http://www.linkedin.com/in/tpfennig