RE: A call to action

["Gerry Chu" <gerrychu bigfoot com>]

> 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.

Of course.  Makes perfect sense.

> Personally I'd be happier to see a more open and consensual approach.

Yes, I would like this to be as much as an open process as possible.

> 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 all redesigns should be done with developer input.  This should
prevent developers from feeling like they've been ordered implement some
design against their own will.  What I mean is, the maintainer / developers
should be part of the group itself that redesigns the component in question.
Hopefully, at the end of the process, everyone will feel like they've done
the right thing.

> 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.

Look at ms windows.  _Horrible_ design compared to Apple. It sells well
though.

> 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.

Yes, it is an uphill battle.  That's why the process for implementing GNOME
ui design should be written down and agreed to by all.  That's also one of
the reasons why I bought a C programming book yesterday, just to hedge my
bets.  As for communications, you mean advertising what our list does,
inviting more hackers to join the list, and seeing if any of our designs
turn up in the next release of GNOME?  It might work.  But I'd rather make
sure what we design actually get into the finished project, to save us from
doing unneeded work.  Please say more about your idea, though, as I was just
going off an assumption.

> > 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.

Well, I might be wrong, but since we're losing and gaining new people on
this mailing list often, the committee people would agree to a time
committment.  The list-only people wouldn't have to.  I mean, look at the
list archives from a year ago, and see how many people you recognize that
still post once in a while.  It's hard to get a team up to design the ui if
people are constantly coming in and dropping out.

But by no means do I envison this committee as some "elite" thing.  As I
said before, the only reason I came up with this committee was high turnover
rate on the list.  But if everyone on this list now can make such a time and
participation committment, forget about the committee idea, and we'll just
have all discussions on this list.

Oh, and the other reason I orginally seperated committee from list is
committee would focus at one component at a time, and list would discuss
whatever, whenever, though I think all committee people should subscribe to
the list also.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.  Everything's still in the idea stage after
all.

Thanks,

Gerry