On Mon, Jun 6, 2011 at 10:59 AM, Dave Neary <dne...@gnome.org> wrote: > To sum it all up, I believe the current dynamic of the design team is doing > damage to GNOME > as a community.
I think what is really doing damage to the community is this kind of hyperbolic accusation around the design team that seems to be in vogue lately, to be honest. Not burning bridges with existing or potential contributors is surely a noble goal, but not alienating your core developers telling them that the fruit of their passion is damaging the community certainly should be a no-brainer? And my 2 cents: if GNOME 3.0 is the kind of result we get from this "damage" I want more of it, not less. > While the design team shouldn't have to "involved everyone" (and that's > not what I'm asking for), they *should* involved everyone affected by > design team decisions - and not to communicate the decisions, but to be > sure that they've got the right question. And in the same way as a > module maintainer can ask the release team to make decisions about the > module, I'd like to see maintainers be able to approach the design team > for help with their module. I maintain a module and I haven't had any particular problem in approaching the design team in the past when I felt the need to do so. There's a difficult debate to be had about what powers a design team can have in an environment like GNOME where nobody can force anybody to do anything, and I'm sure having people concerned with transparency and accountability will prove to be useful. What I don't think is useful is to wildly exaggerate the current situation as some kind of nightmare-ish design-driven gulag and blame all real and perceived problems on a bunch of people meeting on an IRC channel who in the end have no more power than the suggestions they can make to the module developers. It's fine to feel that the "those who show up and do the work get to decide" cavalier attitude some gnome people have is not very fair, but I think this problem is neither new nor constrained to design. We have worked like this for decades, we have shipped our best and worst working like that. If you want to improve things be my guest, but let's start by not alienating the people that "show up and do the work" because we need them the most. Xan _______________________________________________ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list