Dear heavens.
OK, guys, if we're going to "out" ourselves...I will reveal that I
fundamentally don't believe a crowdsourcing model for DESIGN is even
possible, much less advisable.
I believe that crowdsourcing can be helpful to garner ideas (e.g. that
wepc thing at the top of this thread), identify requirements or
brainstorm features (e.g. as Will did on the list the other day), and
settle on shared definitions (e.g. wikipedia).
To me, however, crowdsourcing seems utterly antithetical to the act of
designing. Design involves acts of conscious intention coupled with
creative insight to bring coherence and order to a system. I strongly
believe that design projects must have a strong lead to succeed, both
at the design helm and the project management helm. Nowhere in the
modern world can I think of any example of a group-mind, a crowd,
moving towards greater systemic coherence and order without a strong
individual or individuals at the helm guiding the crowd's thoughts and
intentions.
Now in case you think I'm some "genius design" practitioner, bear in
mind that my core IxD practices were forged at Cooper, a design
consultancy that pioneered the use of personas and two-person teams to
achieve design solutions. I am highly team-oriented, take pains to
remove ego yet retain ingenuity in the design process, and believe
that IxD benefits greatly from collaboration with other skilled
practitioners as well as across disciplines.
That said, working on design problems and delivering solutions as a
small team is not crowdsourcing.
Now, we may have a less radical disagreement here than I fear. Nasir
wrote:
"I like the idea of crowdsourcing the design of this puppy.
Suggestions on how to manage the process? Two challenges I see:
# Of all projects with a self-referential design element, this one
kinda takes the cake :-).
# The temptation/risk of falling into a design-by-committee trap is high
# Being designers, we could iterate and iterate until, like, the end
of days
If we went with a crowdsourced model for the design, I'd propose going
with the curated-crowdsourcing that Mozilla adopts. They have a public
free-for-all tree, but the features that make it into Firefox, etc.
have been cherry-picked by an architect and integrated into the
codebase."
What Nasir is proposing is NOT crowdsourcing the IxD of the next-
generation IxDA infrastructure, but crowdsourcing feature definitions
and perhaps also brainstorming the way those features manifest in
their form & behavior. And note that he also invokes the importance of
having a lead designer to bring order to the system.
But here's my HUGE concern if we were to pursue this route. I strongly
believe that IxDA.org needs some serious new infrastructure YESTERDAY.
Our local groups began exploding in March, right after our first
conference, and we haven't done jack squat for them except open up
Basecamp projects and talk about things. Local group websites are now
being developed piecemeal -- and they're all quite wonderful, but
totally disconnected from each other & IxDA Global. Our general
membership has also increased radically this year, and there's
extremely little visibility that anybody has into or across this deep,
valuable pool of individuals except for a freaking Mailman query the
list administrators can do of how many subscribers we have!
Given that the board has already done requirements and feature
definition over the last four months for the IxDA.org features that we
want to deliver in very short order (namely again: 1) richer member
profiles; 2) an event/calendar system; 3) local group micro-sites; 4)
tools to help local group leaders) we'd be throwing ourselves back to
the starting line. Furthermore, I'm quite sure that it would take a
least a year from now for us to arrive at some group-mind agreement,
much less achieve the *development and delivery* of whatever it is we
conceived.
Therefore, I'm highly averse to pursuing a crowdsourcing effort on
these areas from a scheduling perspective.
I want our organization to get serious about following through on its
intentions by hiring professional development resources to meet our
needs. Presently we are not closed to the option of purchasing a
hosted solution, but are leaning towards an open-source CMS so that
IxDA can really own the platform and give community members ways to
further enhance the user experience. I aim to publish an RFP on these
features in November, and we want to be able to launch solutions by
the Interaction 09 conference. Can anyone seriously argue that these
schedule targets are achievable if we were to pursue a crowdsourcing
effort or seek pro-bono development support from within the open
source community?
Please understand that I am confident that crowdsourcing ideas,
requirements and feature definitions from within this amazing
community of ours could provide us with some extremely innovative and
powerful design concepts. So, let me make a suggestion. Perhaps a more
appropriate design target to harness the great grassroots energy
starting to be exhibited here is around the next generation of our
DISCUSSION features. At the IxDA board retreat, the board identified
this important area as nevertheless secondary to serving the local
group and membership-oriented needs listed above. The infrastructure
team also has given far less attention thus far on to how to bring
IxDA.org up to speed in this arena. This design space would also
include providing better tools for members to dynamically share
perspectives & information and self-generate resources for the
betterment of the community.
So how does that scope sound, Nasir, Dave, Will, al.? Please, do not
derail our current effort.
Writing in pure agony at envisioning near-term delays,
yours truly,
Liz
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Vice-President, IxDA / www.ixda.org
CDO, Devise / www.devise.com
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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