Re: A call to action

[colin z robertson <c z robertson ndirect co uk>]

On Sun, Oct 15, 2000 at 01:04:44PM -0700, Gerry Chu wrote:
> The idea was floating in my mind that a committee form, composed of people
> from the gui-list, gtk, eazel, and helixcode that can make a commitment to
> work on designing GNOME for a significant time period, and can back up their
> opinions with design principles.  The committee would start with current or
> hitsquad designs, and go around to the maintainers or the mailing list of
> the component being designed, and work something out.  So basically, the
> committee will say what GNOME will look like, and perhaps necessarily by
> extension, what the feature set for the next release will be.  We would have
> to get agreement from the developers and from semi-GNOME projects (like
> sawfish) to give the committee that responsibility.

hmm. It's an interesting idea. I do have some reservations about it
though...

Personally I'd be happier to see a more open and consensual approach.
So far the open-source community has had reasonable success at working
to standards simply because everyone agrees that they're the right
thing, not because they've been told to by a committee. I think we'd
do better to tell people what we think and wait for them to see the
correctness of it. Then we let natural selection take care of those
who ignore us.

Also, we can't expect developers to hand over control of their
project's ui to us without first seeing what we'll do to it. They'd
have to be mad to do so.

I really don't think that without doing the coding ourselves we can
have anything more than an advisory role. Anything else really goes
against the grain of open-source development. Right now we're not
having much effect because we aren't doing much communicating. I'd
suggest trying harder on the communications front and then seeing if
that gets us anywhere. 


> Finally, when the component is redesigned, it would be
> put up on the www or shown to the greater mailing list itself for comment.

But what would be the point of that? Surely the list should be where
the discussion starts. There's no point discussing something at the
end of the design period.

colin

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