Re: The website, and the project itself (Was: Re: The website twins...)

[Joakim Ziegler <joakim ximian com>]

On Fri, Apr 27, 2001 at 12:43:14PM +0200, Enrico Zini wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 25, 2001 at 03:37:41PM +0100, Calum Benson wrote:

>> guess we can switch it around again.  When, that is, anyone decides what
>> should actually be on the new usability website anyway  :)
 
> Ready!  Let's get to work!
 
> I will try to sum up the status of the project as of now, and I expect
> someone to complete and correct me, since I know very little of what was
> happening in the pre-guadec age.

Not really *that* much, I think. It seems to me the list you have here is
fairly complete and accurate.


> The Gnome Usability Project divides itself in three activities (from what
> I remember from the Usability BOF):

>  1. Write the Gnome Usability Guidelines
>  2. Form a Gnome Usability Team to do usability research on Gnome and
>     supervise, tutor and coordinate Gnome projects from a usability point
>     of view
>  3. Directly write specifications and code to implement usability
>     improvements (the actual UI Hitsquad)


> The status of the activities is:

>  1. Many ideas, no work done yet
>  2. No team is there; Sun and Ximian (others?) are doing (unrelated?)
>     researches on their usability labs.  Sun published their results on
>     d.g.o/gup
>  3. AFAIK, There is d.g.o/gnome-ui up and running, and people working.

> What to do from now:

>  - lay out a summary of the Gnome Usability Project and its goals
>  - discuss if there are also other activities to start
>  - decide what do we want from each one of our activities
>  - find who will start coordination and work on them.

Well, I'm volunteering to head up the writing group for the Usability
Guidelines. It's what I'd like to devote most of my time to, although I'd
like to get somewhat involved in the other two points you mention as well.

Now, my proposal for the guidelines writer group is something like this:

I will write up a brief introduction to the effort, with a call for
volunteers. This will specify that volunteering means dedicating largish
amounts of time to the project, and will also describe the public review
process, as we've outlined it before (internal review often, external review
once every couple of weeks/month). It'll also contain my ideas about what
stages there are in the project.

I'll send this document to this list for people's comments, and then I'll
send the finished version to this list, gnome-gui-list, gnome-announce-list,
and a couple of interested parties I know about who might not be paying
attention to the lists (Arlo, for instance).

Does this sound good to you guys? If so, I can probably do this during the
weekend.

-- 
 Joakim Ziegler - Ximian HCI Monkey - joakim helixcode com - Radagast IRC
      FIX sysop - free software coder - FIDEL & Conglomerate developer
             http://www.avmaria.com/ - http://www.ximian.com/