Hello Release Team, I'm writing this directly, instead of sending it desktop-devel, because I somehow feel that a management action could be needed on the issue I'm about to raise. Please read everything on a neutral tone: I'm not complaining myself, I'm just reporting what I see and asking for a clarification. I've been looking around for a while, say a few months, and I've been seeing complaints everywhere - planet gnome, linux weekly news, slashdot, random blogs, and above all gnome-shell-list. Everywhere, periodically, someone comes and complains about the very same problems - and punctually he is answered: "it's by design". Some people even prepend: "I know it seems a bug, but", which shows that there is disagreement even inside the "inner community". Did it happen in 2.28? 2.30? 2.32? I don't remember such a volume, but maybe I didn't notice. Is it normal to have so many people upset? Was it taken into account before each of the problematic decision (or will be now)? Is it normal to decide "for the greater good", without considering potential user reaction? They say there is no such thing as good or bad publicity: even so, it is a safe decision to ignore these people and let them rant publicly? Is the marketing team aware of this? (and yes, I'm asking you, release team, instead of them, as I think you are responsible for the whole community, being the ones who take final decisions) Moving on to more technical matters: is there a process for escalating issues? Do we just allow maintainers to have final decisions on their respective modules? How is the community involved (if it is involved at all), should a disagreement arise? Can we expect maintainers to reach a reasonable compromise, or they're allowed to decide whatever they like? What if the developers and designers disagree? Should developers just accept the design team decision? Are developers allowed to override the design team if they believe they are making a mistake? Are developers allowed to take decisions on technical, architectural reasons, instead of focusing only on user experience? More generally speaking, who is setting the goals of the project as a whole - release team, marketing team, design team, maintainers, developers? Who is deciding what GNOME OS will look like (at all levels)? Who is deciding what are our target users, and who therefore we can ignore as people "we're not designing a desktop for" (exact quote from a thread on fedora-desktop)? Is it based on market research? That is, is it provable that this approach will make it easier for GNOME to gain new users? Or maybe those users will never use GNOME, don't even know about it, and with this we're just losing users from previous releases? Or maybe they will use GNOME, but not knowing what it is, they will provide no advantage to the rest of the community? Actually, what is the project following? Market share (as in: the more users, the better)? Abstract design concepts (as in: the cleaner, the better)? Functionality (as in: the more features, the better)? Something else? And the other side, who is allowed to communicate those goals, and speak in the name of the community? In particular, what we do if people particularly influential and well respected in the community come out with: "honestly I'm not really liking the culture around here lately"? Do they still represent us? Should we change, because our leaders change? I don't think there is a right answer to those questions, and I just hope that will start a positive discussion within the release team. Or at least, I'd like to be reassured that the release team knows of the problem (assuming there is one). Giovanni
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