As someone who is just starting to become involved in design & development after many years of using open source & free software, I find these discussions fascinating on multiple levels. For whatever reason I have always found communities in free/open source software to be rather intimidating, which is probably why its taken me so long to become involved. I suspect this is true for many people, and I fully support anything and everything that makes it easier for people to become involved and thereby feel connected to the project.
The article was definitely interesting and as I think about it more and more, I can certainly see how developing a 'planning language' would be helpful to GNOME. With that in mind, I suspect a first step would be to start a wiki page of GNOME Design Terms, with a list of terms and their (community-defined) definitions in relation to GNOME Design. Examples can be added as development proceeds, until we end up with a wiki page explaining our 'planning language' which we can point new people to when they are becoming involved. Such a page/language would certainly streamline and simplify the design process, and allow new (potential) contributors to write proposals and suggestions in a way that makes it easier for everyone to understand and critique them. Another idea would be to begin giving users a simple way to provide feedback on what they prefer in design. This could be done via a GNOME Design Blog or similar, where posts focus on upcoming features along with examples to be voted on – do users prefer buttons/menus/etc that look like X, Y, or Z? Should we remove minimize/maximize/close buttons? Do users want a journal? How important is privacy to you? Etc. Require users to register, and when they do so ask if they'd like to sign up for a (weekly? monthly?) news letter regarding the ongoing development of GNOME and related technologies/applications, as well as new polls, blog posts, etc. Essentially, create a new level of GNOME membership, below the Foundation level, with a much lower bar for inclusion – require only a name and a (verified) email address – and allow almost anyone to participate in the ongoing discussions and development of GNOME. Emily On Fri, May 4, 2012 at 1:03 AM, Diego Escalante Urrelo <[email protected]>wrote: > On Thu, May 3, 2012 at 5:19 PM, Federico Mena Quintero > <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > As a way to solve these issues, I'd like to follow up on an idea which I > > sketched during last year's Desktop Summit - namely, about constructing > > a pattern language for Gnome's design based on the good things that what > > we have and what other systems have done well. > > This. +1. > > From my experience on film stuff, having a way to refer to "those > things that look good or bad" is essential to have collaboration > between different specialists. > > Framing shots would be impossible if there wasn't an abstract way of > describing them (flat/deep, warm/cold, lenses, etc). > > Sound designers/editors, photography directors, even actors, need to > be aware of this language for efficient communication during > production. > > I have been thinking lately that film making has many similarities > with Free Software development. Being both abstract things with an > audiovisual result that involves many different specialists. > > A common language of patterns is an awesome idea. I'd encourage > Federico to expand on the subject. > _______________________________________________ > desktop-devel-list mailing list > [email protected] > http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list > -- Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. - Goethe Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind. - Dr.Seuss Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted. - Albert Einstein
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