Re: loomio
I never said the development teams should use it. I realized technical decisions can't be made by community voting. But - 1. Sometimes a team is interested in seeing what the community/other teams think 2. Some decisions are not technical, like you said the marketing team can find loomio useful So if the marketing team tries loomio, it's just fine, I don't restrict to any specific team, and don't expect any specific team to use or not use it. Do know relevant teams which have mailing lists I can post to? (or forward this message to them) On ד', 2013-04-24 at 11:01 -0700, Sriram Ramkrishna wrote: Well the non-coding parts might accept it. The problem with voting is that it is an emotional choice when it comes to people who are voting and are not part of development. Which can lead to all kinds of conflicts in trying to decide how things develop. If we had voting, we would have had to revert everything and go back to GNOME 1. While at the same time people will be voting to update everything. It's just wrong. But decision making for teams like marketing might work okay if we restrict to a particular set of people. Kind of like having commit access, you get to vote when you put in the time. On Wed, Apr 24, 2013 at 10:13 AM, Marco Scannadinari ma...@scannadinari.co.uk wrote: Hi, is there any progress with this? I there a Gnome team willing to be the pioneer and try loomio, and report about the experience? I don't belong to any team so I can't take responsibility personally (but I'll help you, if you decide to give loomio a try). Unfortunately, it seems both the design-team and desktop-devel teams are quite against the whole idea of loomio or any other community voting system. Andre Klapper also posted a link [0] to a study which suggest that commitee-oriented design processes aren't a good idea. I'm (and probably not a lot of other people) are not in a position to argue or disprove such a study, so, as much as I would like to see it be implemented, I guess that's that... [0] http://nat.org/blog/2006/02/dan-winship-on-design-by-committee/ -- Marco Scannadinari ma...@scannadinari.co.uk ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: loomio
Hi, is there any progress with this? I there a Gnome team willing to be the pioneer and try loomio, and report about the experience? I don't belong to any team so I can't take responsibility personally (but I'll help you, if you decide to give loomio a try). Anatoly On א', 2013-04-14 at 11:36 +0300, אנטולי קרסנר wrote: Hello, I found a tool for collaborative decision making and brainstorming called loomio: https://www.loomio.org/ It's open for private beta, and I think Gnome, as a community project, can really benefit from using it. Currently the communication between people in the project is done in several channels not connected to each other: mailing list, GnomeLive wiki and IRC channels. All three of them treat all text as just plain text, meaning the computer doesn't provide us tools for specific content such as brainstorming, ideas, plans, schedules, etc. Loomio doesn't provide all of these things, but it's a great tool for a community to use for managing ideas and decisions. What do you think? Anatoly ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: loomio
Hi, is there any progress with this? I there a Gnome team willing to be the pioneer and try loomio, and report about the experience? I don't belong to any team so I can't take responsibility personally (but I'll help you, if you decide to give loomio a try). Unfortunately, it seems both the design-team and desktop-devel teams are quite against the whole idea of loomio or any other community voting system. Andre Klapper also posted a link [0] to a study which suggest that commitee-oriented design processes aren't a good idea. I'm (and probably not a lot of other people) are not in a position to argue or disprove such a study, so, as much as I would like to see it be implemented, I guess that's that... [0] http://nat.org/blog/2006/02/dan-winship-on-design-by-committee/ -- Marco Scannadinari ma...@scannadinari.co.uk ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: loomio
Well the non-coding parts might accept it. The problem with voting is that it is an emotional choice when it comes to people who are voting and are not part of development. Which can lead to all kinds of conflicts in trying to decide how things develop. If we had voting, we would have had to revert everything and go back to GNOME 1. While at the same time people will be voting to update everything. It's just wrong. But decision making for teams like marketing might work okay if we restrict to a particular set of people. Kind of like having commit access, you get to vote when you put in the time. On Wed, Apr 24, 2013 at 10:13 AM, Marco Scannadinari ma...@scannadinari.co.uk wrote: Hi, is there any progress with this? I there a Gnome team willing to be the pioneer and try loomio, and report about the experience? I don't belong to any team so I can't take responsibility personally (but I'll help you, if you decide to give loomio a try). Unfortunately, it seems both the design-team and desktop-devel teams are quite against the whole idea of loomio or any other community voting system. Andre Klapper also posted a link [0] to a study which suggest that commitee-oriented design processes aren't a good idea. I'm (and probably not a lot of other people) are not in a position to argue or disprove such a study, so, as much as I would like to see it be implemented, I guess that's that... [0] http://nat.org/blog/2006/02/dan-winship-on-design-by-committee/ -- Marco Scannadinari ma...@scannadinari.co.uk ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: loomio
On Tue, Apr 16, 2013 at 10:08:31PM +0100, Marco Scannadinari wrote: So you want to have random people suddenly join, be of the decision and have equal say? I find that a little bit weird. As opposed to the method that we have now which is..? People who are part of the team. If you're investing time into things you'll have more say. I think you're mixing up decisions with doing a study? E.g. you assume because of such a tool suddenly 'GNOME 3' will work different? (to be clear: I'm asking, not suggesting) -- Regards, Olav PS: Please do not cc me on replies. ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: loomio
On Tue, Apr 16, 2013 at 10:06:51PM +0100, Marco Scannadinari wrote: If someone posts a proposal on gnome-devel, for example, it would not be efficient or easy for each user to give their approval: Yeah I love Here you clearly assume that it will be used for software development. If you want to test something, a usability study should be done. Not random people who show up for some decision. That's going to be just as biased as having the decision taken by the current people. -- Regards, Olav ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: loomio
I agree, random people can't have the same influence on votes like the people actually seriously involved, but like Sri and Marco said, there are already existing cases in which such a system can be very useful. Seif offered to try it with the Gnome Music team, but anyone else who wants to give it a try is very welcome too. I couldn't set up an account because I don't personally belong to any team so I can't speak for a whole team, but signing up is quite easy: we just need to fill a form for beta-testing it (currently all organizations using loomio are considered private beta testers, although it is already used successfully by organizations of all sizes): https://www.loomio.org/group_requests/new Anatoly On ג', 2013-04-16 at 23:30 +0200, Andre Klapper wrote: On Tue, 2013-04-16 at 22:08 +0100, Marco Scannadinari wrote: So you want to have random people suddenly join, be of the decision and have equal say? I find that a little bit weird. As opposed to the method that we have now which is..? (I cannot speak for all teams, as I'm not in all teams. Anybody feel free to correct me please.) Most teams have meetings sometimes, mostly IRC based (though some also have phone or Google Hangouts as far as I know). Except for board and release-team, team membership is not exclusive / defined, and (except for board) meetings are public. Newcomers and lurkers are welcome to meetings and to provide input to influence decisions, but when it comes to hard voting (if decision making process is not consense-based) I'd expect only established people to feel like taking part anyway, or at least expect their votes to have way more weight. In the end that's how I understand meritocracy. Also see section 5.5.2 Community of http://www.dgsiegel.net/foss-development-processes andre ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: loomio
I think you're mixing up decisions with doing a study? E.g. you assume because of such a tool suddenly 'GNOME 3' will work different? (to be clear: I'm asking, not suggesting) No, I don't think that GNOME will suddenly become the perfect DE, but certain decisions, such as the location of the close button on fullscreen apps, could be improved a lot and polls could be used as evidence for user testing or feedback, rather than saying We thought it was the right thing to do. (for example) BTW Aren't decisions made based on user studies if availible? -- Marco Scannadinari ma...@scannadinari.co.uk ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: loomio
On Tue, Apr 16, 2013 at 10:06:51PM +0100, Marco Scannadinari wrote: If someone posts a proposal on gnome-devel, for example, it would not be efficient or easy for each user to give their approval: Yeah I love Here you clearly assume that it will be used for software development. I did say for example - this service can be used globally accross the GNOME Foundation and its groups. If you want to test something, a usability study should be done. Not random people who show up for some decision. That's going to be just as biased as having the decision taken by the current people. I'm not saying that we should invite everyone to the discussion, but even so, having random people would be completely un-biased, as they would probably have no affiliation with the project (for usability studies anyway). We could probably have a discussion locked to members of the design-team, devel-team(?), translation-team, etc, and have invites sent if someone is not part of the team and would be appreciated in the discussion. Even if this feature does not exist, the source is free and can be modified on GNOME's own loomio instance if the devs are not willing to implement the potential commit(s). -- Marco Scannadinari ma...@scannadinari.co.uk ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: loomio
On Wed, 2013-04-17 at 17:24 +0100, Marco Scannadinari wrote: No, I don't think that GNOME will suddenly become the perfect DE, but certain decisions, such as the location of the close button on fullscreen apps, could be improved a lot and polls could be used as evidence for user testing or feedback, rather than saying We thought it was the right thing to do. (for example) Please not. Polls are popularity contests and cannot replace user testing. http://nat.org/blog/2006/02/dan-winship-on-design-by-committee/ comes to my mind (unfortunately the paintings are not online anymore). andre -- Andre Klapper | ak...@gmx.net http://blogs.gnome.org/aklapper/ ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: loomio
Lets consider a concrete example. Before Gnome Shell was initially released, I (like many others) didn't like the lack of a power off option in the system menu (or anywhere on the desktop). I've been an on and off lurker on IRC for a while. I brought up the concern a few times perhaps. At one point, I got into a small debate with owen about the design/user experience trade-offs of the issue. He made multiple specific arguments *against* having it in the menu and for having suspend (which I found completely unconvincing). I made multiple arguments *for* including it in the menu. It ended with him saying he'd wasted enough time debating the issue. Three release cycles later, all of a sudden, there's a power off option in the menu right where suspend used to be (with the inverse behavior now! Alt-click - suspends). I'm glad for it; don't get me wrong. But, what I'd like to know is, what arguments were made to finally convince owen and whoever else pushed through the change? Were the arguments he mead before somehow obsolete? I'd be fascinated to know, since I did my best to make a persuasive case before and was ultimately shot down. (Seriously, if anyone knows of a record of this, I'd like to see it) Is it possible a tool like loomio could help? I don't know much about it in particular, but I think it's clear that the Gnome development process could greatly benefit from more of what it appears to facilitate. On Wed, Apr 17, 2013 at 12:38 PM, Andre Klapper ak...@gmx.net wrote: On Wed, 2013-04-17 at 17:24 +0100, Marco Scannadinari wrote: No, I don't think that GNOME will suddenly become the perfect DE, but certain decisions, such as the location of the close button on fullscreen apps, could be improved a lot and polls could be used as evidence for user testing or feedback, rather than saying We thought it was the right thing to do. (for example) Please not. Polls are popularity contests and cannot replace user testing. http://nat.org/blog/2006/02/dan-winship-on-design-by-committee/ comes to my mind (unfortunately the paintings are not online anymore). andre -- Andre Klapper | ak...@gmx.net http://blogs.gnome.org/aklapper/ ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Fwd: loomio
(Apologies if this is a resend.) Lets consider a concrete example. Before Gnome Shell was initially released, I (like many others) didn't like the lack of a power off option in the system menu (or anywhere on the desktop). I've been an on and off lurker on IRC for a while. I brought up the concern a few times perhaps. At one point, I got into a small debate with owen about the design/user experience trade-offs of the issue. He made multiple specific arguments *against* having it in the menu and for having suspend (which I found completely unconvincing). I made multiple arguments *for* including it in the menu. It ended with him saying he'd wasted enough time debating the issue. Three release cycles later, all of a sudden, there's a power off option in the menu right where suspend used to be (with the inverse behavior now! Alt-click - suspends). I'm glad for it; don't get me wrong. But, what I'd like to know is, what arguments were made to finally convince owen and whoever else pushed through the change? Were the arguments he mead before somehow obsolete? I'd be fascinated to know, since I did my best to make a persuasive case before and was ultimately shot down. (Seriously, if anyone knows of a record of this, I'd like to see it) Is it possible a tool like loomio could help? I don't know much about it in particular, but I think it's clear that the Gnome development process could greatly benefit from more of what it appears to facilitate. Jesse On Wed, Apr 17, 2013 at 12:38 PM, Andre Klapper ak...@gmx.net wrote: On Wed, 2013-04-17 at 17:24 +0100, Marco Scannadinari wrote: No, I don't think that GNOME will suddenly become the perfect DE, but certain decisions, such as the location of the close button on fullscreen apps, could be improved a lot and polls could be used as evidence for user testing or feedback, rather than saying We thought it was the right thing to do. (for example) Please not. Polls are popularity contests and cannot replace user testing. http://nat.org/blog/2006/02/dan-winship-on-design-by-committee/ comes to my mind (unfortunately the paintings are not online anymore). andre -- Andre Klapper | ak...@gmx.net http://blogs.gnome.org/aklapper/ ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: loomio
On Wed, 2013-04-17 at 13:10 -0400, Jesse Hutton wrote: Lets consider a concrete example. Before Gnome Shell was initially released, I (like many others) didn't like the lack of a power off option in the system menu (or anywhere on the desktop). I've been an on and off lurker on IRC for a while. I brought up the concern a few times perhaps. At one point, I got into a small debate with owen about the design/user experience trade-offs of the issue. He made multiple specific arguments *against* having it in the menu and for having suspend (which I found completely unconvincing). I made multiple arguments *for* including it in the menu. It ended with him saying he'd wasted enough time debating the issue. This example is not an usability study, it was a debate between 2 people having different opinions. I could also make the case in opposite direction, debates that proven to be right with the time, in both 2.x and 3.x cycles. The most famous that comes to my mind is workspaces versus viewports. Today nobody cares. Does this prove anything? I do not think so. Three release cycles later, all of a sudden, there's a power off option in the menu right where suspend used to be (with the inverse behavior now! Alt-click - suspends). I'm glad for it; don't get me wrong. But, what I'd like to know is, what arguments were made to finally convince owen and whoever else pushed through the change? Were the arguments he mead before somehow obsolete? I'd be fascinated to know, since I did my best to make a persuasive case before and was ultimately shot down. (Seriously, if anyone knows of a record of this, I'd like to see it) What makes you think that Owen changed his mind? or what makes you think that he did the changes? or what makes you think the change was done because of your arguments? I do not know, but it could have been all coincidence and -perhaps- the 'I told you so' argument does not apply here. This seems to be the relevant bug: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=647441 Is it possible a tool like loomio could help? I don't know much about it in particular, but I think it's clear that the Gnome development process could greatly benefit from more of what it appears to facilitate. IMVHO, other problems seem more important to solve in the short-term, such as: 1. Few people are building and testing the whole system since early stage of development. 2. Plenty of bugs (usability issues included) are reported late in the development cycle (after the beta period). There is ongoing work to improve this situation in the long-term, but having a system for voting does not seem to help in none of these unfortunately. It could help in other areas, though. It is different discussing with empirical data than just discussing different points of view (sometimes with a partial understanding of the goals, implementations details or restrictions). IMVHO, the former helps more. -- Germán Poo-Caamaño http://calcifer.org/ signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: loomio
On Wed, Apr 17, 2013 at 2:41 PM, Germán Póo-Caamaño g...@gnome.org wrote: On Wed, 2013-04-17 at 13:10 -0400, Jesse Hutton wrote: Lets consider a concrete example. Before Gnome Shell was initially released, I (like many others) didn't like the lack of a power off option in the system menu (or anywhere on the desktop). I've been an on and off lurker on IRC for a while. I brought up the concern a few times perhaps. At one point, I got into a small debate with owen about the design/user experience trade-offs of the issue. He made multiple specific arguments *against* having it in the menu and for having suspend (which I found completely unconvincing). I made multiple arguments *for* including it in the menu. It ended with him saying he'd wasted enough time debating the issue. This example is not an usability study, it was a debate between 2 people having different opinions. I could also make the case in opposite direction, debates that proven to be right with the time, in both 2.x and 3.x cycles. The most famous that comes to my mind is workspaces versus viewports. Today nobody cares. How do you know that nobody cares? It might be nice to actually have the arguments for and against a given issue documented and archived. It would at least provide some history and evidence as to why certain decisions were made. Some people may find that interesting and valuable. Does this prove anything? I do not think so. Three release cycles later, all of a sudden, there's a power off option in the menu right where suspend used to be (with the inverse behavior now! Alt-click - suspends). I'm glad for it; don't get me wrong. But, what I'd like to know is, what arguments were made to finally convince owen and whoever else pushed through the change? Were the arguments he mead before somehow obsolete? I'd be fascinated to know, since I did my best to make a persuasive case before and was ultimately shot down. (Seriously, if anyone knows of a record of this, I'd like to see it) What makes you think that Owen changed his mind? or what makes you think that he did the changes? or what makes you think the change was done because of your arguments? I do not know, but it could have been all coincidence and -perhaps- the 'I told you so' argument does not apply here. This seems to be the relevant bug: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=647441 You misunderstand me. I don't assume that the change was done because of the arguments I made in IRC a year and a half ago. In fact, I really hope not. What I am genuinely curious about is what are the arguments that finally convinced the deciders (whoever they are) to do an about face? The bug report below offers no reasoning besides suspend being available by shutting a laptop lid (or w/power button). Both of those things were discussed before! So, what changed? Jesse ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: loomio
On Wed, 2013-04-17 at 14:55 -0400, Jesse Hutton wrote: On Wed, Apr 17, 2013 at 2:41 PM, Germán Póo-Caamaño g...@gnome.org wrote: On Wed, 2013-04-17 at 13:10 -0400, Jesse Hutton wrote: Lets consider a concrete example. Before Gnome Shell was initially released, I (like many others) didn't like the lack of a power off option in the system menu (or anywhere on the desktop). I've been an on and off lurker on IRC for a while. I brought up the concern a few times perhaps. At one point, I got into a small debate with owen about the design/user experience trade-offs of the issue. He made multiple specific arguments *against* having it in the menu and for having suspend (which I found completely unconvincing). I made multiple arguments *for* including it in the menu. It ended with him saying he'd wasted enough time debating the issue. This example is not an usability study, it was a debate between 2 people having different opinions. I could also make the case in opposite direction, debates that proven to be right with the time, in both 2.x and 3.x cycles. The most famous that comes to my mind is workspaces versus viewports. Today nobody cares. How do you know that nobody cares? It might be nice to actually have the arguments for and against a given issue documented and archived. It would at least provide some history and evidence as to why certain decisions were made. Some people may find that interesting and valuable. I am pretty sure the discussion (and all the bike-shedding) are documented and archived in bugzilla and the mailing lists. For instance: https://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2002-May/msg00173.html Anyway, I do not want to start repeating the discussion over and over again. See http://ometer.com/free-software-ui.html for a good summary (replace GNOME 2 by GNOME 3 and you are done). -- Germán Poo-Caamaño http://calcifer.org/ signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: loomio
On Wed, Apr 17, 2013 at 05:34:55PM +0100, Marco Scannadinari wrote: On Tue, Apr 16, 2013 at 10:06:51PM +0100, Marco Scannadinari wrote: If someone posts a proposal on gnome-devel, for example, it would not be efficient or easy for each user to give their approval: Yeah I love Here you clearly assume that it will be used for software development. I did say for example - this service can be used globally accross the GNOME Foundation and its groups. If you want to test something, a usability study should be done. Not random people who show up for some decision. That's going to be just as biased as having the decision taken by the current people. I'm not saying that we should invite everyone to the discussion, but even so, having random people would be completely un-biased, as they would probably have no affiliation with the project (for usability studies anyway). A usability study is totally different than voting! Furthermore, if you invite random people to join, things *will* be biased. Only people who care enough will show up. The objective should be to have usable software. For that, there should be usability studies. IMO there are not enough usability studies done at the moment. But if we lack usability studies, I don't see voting as a solution. IMO it'll just make things worse. We could probably have a discussion locked to members of the design-team, devel-team(?), translation-team, etc, and have invites sent if someone is not part of the team and would be appreciated in the discussion. Even if this feature does not exist, the source is free and can be modified on GNOME's own loomio instance if the devs are not willing to implement the potential commit(s). Release team just votes in an IRC channel and we make minutes and write those on a wiki. Sometimes we're meeting in person and we vote by asking 'who agrees'. I'm not saying a web tool might not help with such cases, but you're arguing two different things at the same time. Partly about voting within existing teams, partly that other people should join with IMO the assumption that would improve usability (I disagree, others already gave enough explanation why). -- Regards, Olav ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: loomio
If the tool looks intersting, then an extract of the conclusions could be posted to the devel-list. Regards Leslie Mr. Leslie Satenstein 50 years in Information Technology and going strong. Yesterday was a good day, today is a better day, and tomorrow will be even better.mailto:lsatenst...@yahoo.com alternative: leslie.satenst...@gmail.com SENT FROM MY OPEN SOURCE LINUX SYSTEM. --- On Sun, 4/14/13, Andy Tai a...@atai.org wrote: From: Andy Tai a...@atai.org Subject: Re: loomio To: אנטולי קרסנר tomback...@gmail.com Cc: gnome desktop devel desktop-devel-list@gnome.org Date: Sunday, April 14, 2013, 3:43 PM GNOME is a free software project where all the decision making process should be transparent. Mailing lists, for example, are transparent. The tool you recommend will go against the spirit of openness and community. On Sun, Apr 14, 2013 at 1:36 AM, אנטולי קרסנר tomback...@gmail.com wrote: Hello, I found a tool for collaborative decision making and brainstorming called loomio: https://www.loomio.org/ It's open for private beta, and I think Gnome, as a community project, can really benefit from using it. Currently the communication between people in the project is done in several channels not connected to each other: mailing list, GnomeLive wiki and IRC channels. All three of them treat all text as just plain text, meaning the computer doesn't provide us tools for specific content such as brainstorming, ideas, plans, schedules, etc. Loomio doesn't provide all of these things, but it's a great tool for a community to use for managing ideas and decisions. What do you think? Anatoly ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list -- Andy Tai, a...@atai.org, Skype: licheng.tai Year 2013 民國102年 自動的精神力是信仰與覺悟 自動的行為力是勞動與技能 -Inline Attachment Follows- ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: loomio
On Mon, Apr 15, 2013 at 05:21:15PM +0100, Marco Scannadinari wrote: [0] (Restricted in that users do not know that it exists, or that they are allowed to participate. And if they do, they may not be notified of a decision meeting when it occurs.) I don't get this at all. This implies that there are decision meetings and that the decision is taken equally by the number of people part of the decision. I don't see how having a web based tool changes anything regarding being able to be allowed to participate. I think it is nice that it will be tried out in practice, but please don't assume all kinds of things that are somehow supposed to happen. -- Regards, Olav ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: loomio
On Tue, Apr 16, 2013 at 12:53 PM, Olav Vitters o...@vitters.nl wrote: On Mon, Apr 15, 2013 at 05:21:15PM +0100, Marco Scannadinari wrote: [0] (Restricted in that users do not know that it exists, or that they are allowed to participate. And if they do, they may not be notified of a decision meeting when it occurs.) I don't get this at all. This implies that there are decision meetings and that the decision is taken equally by the number of people part of the decision. I don't see how having a web based tool changes anything regarding being able to be allowed to participate. They do exist. We in the marketing team make tactical and strategic decisions all the time. It might be in code space, but other teams do use them. I think this particular tools documents what decision was made and in what context. That's a little hard to do if you have to scan through emails at least for hte marketinig team. Of course it implies that we have some discipline to do this. :-) sri I think it is nice that it will be tried out in practice, but please don't assume all kinds of things that are somehow supposed to happen. -- Regards, Olav ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: loomio
On Tue, Apr 16, 2013 at 01:49:48PM -0700, Sriram Ramkrishna wrote: On Tue, Apr 16, 2013 at 12:53 PM, Olav Vitters o...@vitters.nl wrote: On Mon, Apr 15, 2013 at 05:21:15PM +0100, Marco Scannadinari wrote: [0] (Restricted in that users do not know that it exists, or that they are allowed to participate. And if they do, they may not be notified of a decision meeting when it occurs.) I don't get this at all. This implies that there are decision meetings and that the decision is taken equally by the number of people part of the decision. I don't see how having a web based tool changes anything regarding being able to be allowed to participate. They do exist. We in the marketing team make tactical and strategic decisions all the time. It might be in code space, but other teams do use them. I think this particular tools documents what decision was made and in what context. That's a little hard to do if you have to scan through emails at least for hte marketinig team. Of course it implies that we have some discipline to do this. :-) So you want to have random people suddenly join, be of the decision and have equal say? I find that a little bit weird. -- Regards, Olav ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: loomio
On Tue, Apr 16, 2013 at 01:49:48PM -0700, Sriram Ramkrishna wrote: On Tue, Apr 16, 2013 at 12:53 PM, Olav Vitters o...@vitters.nl wrote: On Mon, Apr 15, 2013 at 05:21:15PM +0100, Marco Scannadinari wrote: [0] (Restricted in that users do not know that it exists, or that they are allowed to participate. And if they do, they may not be notified of a decision meeting when it occurs.) I don't get this at all. This implies that there are decision meetings and that the decision is taken equally by the number of people part of the decision. I don't see how having a web based tool changes anything regarding being able to be allowed to participate. They do exist. We in the marketing team make tactical and strategic decisions all the time. It might be in code space, but other teams do use them. I think this particular tools documents what decision was made and in what context. That's a little hard to do if you have to scan through emails at least for hte marketinig team. Of course it implies that we have some discipline to do this. :-) So you want to have random people suddenly join, be of the decision and have equal say? I find that a little bit weird. Mailing lists are not designed for vote-taking, proposals, and such - the primary contents of nearly all mailing lists are discussions and announcements. If someone posts a proposal on gnome-devel, for example, it would not be efficient or easy for each user to give their approval: Yeah I love this idea please implement it, I agree., I am not in favor because $REASONS, etc, etc. There is no ticket system for taking in votes, and no standardisation in the voting and discussion procedures. It would be even harder for the poor guy who has to collect in all of the votes, which would mean discerning how much in favour the votee is of the proposal, and having to hand-file the results. With loomio, this process is automated and it is a dedicated service for these taks. At the very least, GNOME could have a test-run of it for a month or so. -- Marco Scannadinari ma...@scannadinari.co.uk ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: loomio
So you want to have random people suddenly join, be of the decision and have equal say? I find that a little bit weird. As opposed to the method that we have now which is..? -- Marco Scannadinari ma...@scannadinari.co.uk ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: loomio
On Tue, 2013-04-16 at 22:08 +0100, Marco Scannadinari wrote: So you want to have random people suddenly join, be of the decision and have equal say? I find that a little bit weird. As opposed to the method that we have now which is..? (I cannot speak for all teams, as I'm not in all teams. Anybody feel free to correct me please.) Most teams have meetings sometimes, mostly IRC based (though some also have phone or Google Hangouts as far as I know). Except for board and release-team, team membership is not exclusive / defined, and (except for board) meetings are public. Newcomers and lurkers are welcome to meetings and to provide input to influence decisions, but when it comes to hard voting (if decision making process is not consense-based) I'd expect only established people to feel like taking part anyway, or at least expect their votes to have way more weight. In the end that's how I understand meritocracy. Also see section 5.5.2 Community of http://www.dgsiegel.net/foss-development-processes andre -- Andre Klapper | ak...@gmx.net http://blogs.gnome.org/aklapper/ ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: loomio
On Tue, 2013-04-16 at 13:49 -0700, Sriram Ramkrishna wrote: I think this particular tools documents what decision was made and in what context. That's a little hard to do if you have to scan through emails at least for hte marketinig team. Of course it implies that we have some discipline to do this. :-) As an example, links to emails with release-team meeting minutes are listed at https://live.gnome.org/ReleasePlanning/Meetings . Would like to know a specific example why this might not be sufficient, to understand the problem better (plus if a problem actually exists). andre -- Andre Klapper | ak...@gmx.net http://blogs.gnome.org/aklapper/ ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: loomio
On Sun, Apr 14, 2013 at 11:36:54AM +0300, אנטולי קרסנר wrote: What do you think? How are you involved in this? I get the impression that you're involved and will use GNOME in your marketing material. Initial impressions: - lacks silent thinking ideas - surveys should not be public during voting period - surveys assume all people have an equal say, this is not the case -- Regards, Olav ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: loomio
GNOME is a free software project where all the decision making process should be transparent. Mailing lists, for example, are transparent. The tool you recommend will go against the spirit of openness and community. On Sun, Apr 14, 2013 at 1:36 AM, אנטולי קרסנר tomback...@gmail.com wrote: Hello, I found a tool for collaborative decision making and brainstorming called loomio: https://www.loomio.org/ It's open for private beta, and I think Gnome, as a community project, can really benefit from using it. Currently the communication between people in the project is done in several channels not connected to each other: mailing list, GnomeLive wiki and IRC channels. All three of them treat all text as just plain text, meaning the computer doesn't provide us tools for specific content such as brainstorming, ideas, plans, schedules, etc. Loomio doesn't provide all of these things, but it's a great tool for a community to use for managing ideas and decisions. What do you think? Anatoly ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list -- Andy Tai, a...@atai.org, Skype: licheng.tai Year 2013 民國102年 自動的精神力是信仰與覺悟 自動的行為力是勞動與技能 ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: loomio
I agree, I didn't mean to change the way module maintainers make specific technical decisions for their modules. But many decisions are relevant for the whole community, and using such software would allow people to participate more easily and give them a feeling their voice counts. Keeping track of the process would become much easier than the current mix of IRC, mailing lists and wiki pages. I sent a message to the gnome-love list too, hoping relevant teams will see it there. Since I don't even have any area of responsibility in the Gnome project, all I'm doing is to suggest the use of loomio. The decision is up to the people responsible for things here in the actual teams. I wanted to make sure you are aware of loomio. Olav mentioned something about involvement or marketing which I didn't understand, but just to make things clear: I have nothing to do with loomio or Gnome (except for being a user on Gnome 3 on my laptop), I'm just a random person who heard about loomio and suggests you to use it, if it fits the project's decision making model. Everything else is up to you, I can't speak to anyone in the name of the whole community. Enjoy :) On א', 2013-04-14 at 21:31 -0700, Sriram Ramkrishna wrote: On Sun, Apr 14, 2013 at 7:53 PM, Germán Póo-Caamaño g...@gnome.org wrote: On Sun, 2013-04-14 at 20:53 -0400, Hashem Nasarat wrote: [...] Sriram, while I agree many problems would be alleviated with more volunteer time, I've witnessed multiple instances in the past 6 months where decisions were not made democratically, despite a clear lack of consensus. Most recently, there were a great deal of changes to the gnome-shell All Applications view very late in the 3.8 schedule, well after code freeze, and despite visible disagreement. Loomio seems to offer an intuitive way of seeing how controversial a change is. If I’d asked people what they wanted, they would have asked for a better horse -- Henry Ford [1] Software development is not a democracy. Decisions are taken by people who actually develop the software. Comments might or might not be welcomed depending of several factors (politeness, pertinence, reputation, data, etc.). Germán is right. In free software land, the module maintainer is the ultimate dictator of what goes into the code base. So the decision falls upon the maintainer and a trusted cohort or two. In which case, decisions are fairly easy to come to and you don't really need decision software. Marketing and others non-coding teams tends to require more consensus mostly because sometimes money and tangible resources are involved so decisions are done jointly. That's where such things would be interesting. So for instance, your suggestion of decision software might quite well for the Board when trying to document consensus, but it doesn't map well to the technical culture of free software. sri ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: loomio
On Mon, 2013-04-15 at 14:49 +0300, אנטולי קרסנר wrote: Keeping track of the process would become much easier than the current mix of IRC, mailing lists and wiki pages. So then it would be a mix of IRC, mailing lists, wiki pages, and this thing. As ever, http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/standards.png AfC Sydney signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: loomio
If we all always thought and decided on things the way you suggest, then nothing would ever change. It's not a big secret that tools like wikis and mailing lists are very general-purpose and the reason they're used so widely is that creating tools for specific tasks is a very difficult task. Even professional and proprietary getting-things-done tools are not that widely used, because making them serve the purpose is difficult. I agree the ease of use, years of proven success and general-purpose-ness of IRC, mailing lists and wikis make them very useful, but clearly it's possible to have even better tools. And one day I discover loomio. It's not project management, but collaborative decision making can definitely benefit from it, and provide by far more than any mailing list can. So I'm not attacking the relevance of existing tools. I'm suggesting a tool which may be better for some use cases. Maybe it can, maybe it can't, but don't judge so quickly. On ב', 2013-04-15 at 22:19 +1000, Andrew Cowie wrote: On Mon, 2013-04-15 at 14:49 +0300, אנטולי קרסנר wrote: Keeping track of the process would become much easier than the current mix of IRC, mailing lists and wiki pages. So then it would be a mix of IRC, mailing lists, wiki pages, and this thing. As ever, http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/standards.png AfC Sydney ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: loomio
On Mon, Apr 15, 2013 at 03:33:06PM +0300, אנטולי קרסנר wrote: So I'm not attacking the relevance of existing tools. I'm suggesting a tool which may be better for some use cases. Maybe it can, maybe it can't, but don't judge so quickly. It just seems some basics are missing. What is missing from what we currently have, what are the benefits or what we currently have. Then go on to check what can solve it in a better way. At the moment I'm guessing: 1. wish for all decisions to be documented 2. decisions to be easily findable by people who are not involved 3. all components of a decision to be logged If above is a good summary, then: #1 is nice to have, #3 is IMO unrealistic, #2 is not the right focus, should be better if people taking decisions can log their reasoning more easily. -- Regards, Olav ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: loomio
Hmm I am very uncertain about loomio, however since I am working on gnome-music with a small team, we could try using loomio for a bit to see if it in any way improves our workflow. We could report and blog about the experiecen. However that would require Anatoly to set up the whole infrastructure for it. I would say the sooner the better. Cheers Seif On Mon, Apr 15, 2013 at 4:11 PM, Olav Vitters o...@vitters.nl wrote: On Mon, Apr 15, 2013 at 03:33:06PM +0300, אנטולי קרסנר wrote: So I'm not attacking the relevance of existing tools. I'm suggesting a tool which may be better for some use cases. Maybe it can, maybe it can't, but don't judge so quickly. It just seems some basics are missing. What is missing from what we currently have, what are the benefits or what we currently have. Then go on to check what can solve it in a better way. At the moment I'm guessing: 1. wish for all decisions to be documented 2. decisions to be easily findable by people who are not involved 3. all components of a decision to be logged If above is a good summary, then: #1 is nice to have, #3 is IMO unrealistic, #2 is not the right focus, should be better if people taking decisions can log their reasoning more easily. -- Regards, Olav ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: loomio
With pleasure :) But it depends on the necessary resources. If they supply their own server on which they create the group account, all I need to do is fill a form. But I don't have all the details: https://www.loomio.org/group_requests/new On ב', 2013-04-15 at 16:31 +0200, seiflo...@googlemail.com wrote: Hmm I am very uncertain about loomio, however since I am working on gnome-music with a small team, we could try using loomio for a bit to see if it in any way improves our workflow. We could report and blog about the experiecen. However that would require Anatoly to set up the whole infrastructure for it. I would say the sooner the better. Cheers Seif On Mon, Apr 15, 2013 at 4:11 PM, Olav Vitters o...@vitters.nl wrote: On Mon, Apr 15, 2013 at 03:33:06PM +0300, אנטולי קרסנר wrote: So I'm not attacking the relevance of existing tools. I'm suggesting a tool which may be better for some use cases. Maybe it can, maybe it can't, but don't judge so quickly. It just seems some basics are missing. What is missing from what we currently have, what are the benefits or what we currently have. Then go on to check what can solve it in a better way. At the moment I'm guessing: 1. wish for all decisions to be documented 2. decisions to be easily findable by people who are not involved 3. all components of a decision to be logged If above is a good summary, then: #1 is nice to have, #3 is IMO unrealistic, #2 is not the right focus, should be better if people taking decisions can log their reasoning more easily. -- Regards, Olav ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: loomio
On 14/04/13 09:36, אנטולי קרסנר wrote: Hello, Hello, I found a tool for collaborative decision making and brainstorming called loomio: https://www.loomio.org/ Interesting. It's open for private beta, and I think Gnome, as a community project, can really benefit from using it. Currently the communication between people in the project is done in several channels not connected to each other: mailing list, GnomeLive wiki and IRC channels. All three of them treat all text as just plain text, meaning the computer doesn't provide us tools for specific content such as brainstorming, ideas, plans, schedules, etc. Loomio doesn't provide all of these things, but it's a great tool for a community to use for managing ideas and decisions. What do you think? - The code is available I read, so I would say it makes sense if we could at least share *results* and possibly comments by exporting to this? mailing list - for those who don't want to sign up to the tool - for transparency, etc. - I think it would be a good idea for things like new ideas for the next GNOME version which Matthias puts out (for example). This tool is about improving the ideas that come out of the mill and gaining feedback. - I think there is often a lot of indirect discussion and nitpicking around some of the threads here and a tool like this may improve that issue. - In the worst case, why not just trial it and see how it goes. We can always stick to what we have if it doesn't pick up. If I’d asked people what they wanted, they would have asked for a better horse -- Henry Ford [1] There is some truth here, but I would not consider ALL ideas and development around GNOME to pertain to this argument. How many times has the community introduced so called black swan event changes compared to regular changes? What I am saying is, this is talking about a minority and extremity of cases here to prove a point which is infinitely less relevant. Software development is not a democracy. Decisions are taken by people who actually develop the software. Comments might or might not be welcomed depending of several factors (politeness, pertinence, reputation, data, etc.). I don't think that just because one develops software, this tool would be useless. I don't think you can tar everyone with the same brush. -- Regards, Martyn Founder and CEO of Lanedo GmbH. ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: loomio
GNOME is a free software project where all the decision making process should be transparent. Mailing lists, for example, are transparent. The tool you recommend will go against the spirit of openness and community. How? The whole service is open source, and if anything, it will increase the level of transparen[cy] in GNOME, as decisions will be opened to our end-users and the community, as opposed to them taking place in the restricted [0] form of mailing lists and IRC. [0] (Restricted in that users do not know that it exists, or that they are allowed to participate. And if they do, they may not be notified of a decision meeting when it occurs.) -- Marco Scannadinari ma...@scannadinari.co.uk ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
loomio
Hello, I found a tool for collaborative decision making and brainstorming called loomio: https://www.loomio.org/ It's open for private beta, and I think Gnome, as a community project, can really benefit from using it. Currently the communication between people in the project is done in several channels not connected to each other: mailing list, GnomeLive wiki and IRC channels. All three of them treat all text as just plain text, meaning the computer doesn't provide us tools for specific content such as brainstorming, ideas, plans, schedules, etc. Loomio doesn't provide all of these things, but it's a great tool for a community to use for managing ideas and decisions. What do you think? Anatoly ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: loomio
I looked at this and it seems quite interesting. The one problem I see is that this would subsume our current mailing list structure. We would have to bring this in house so that people could see what the decisions are and why. Overall, I think it's a good way to take conversations out of IRC and making it formal on such a structure. But it doesn't seem like they have released the code yet. In any case, what problem are we exactly trying to solve here? Most of the problems we have is related to our time schedules as volunteers. This is mostly solved by adding more people to the project. sri On Sun, Apr 14, 2013 at 1:36 AM, אנטולי קרסנר tomback...@gmail.com wrote: Hello, I found a tool for collaborative decision making and brainstorming called loomio: https://www.loomio.org/ It's open for private beta, and I think Gnome, as a community project, can really benefit from using it. Currently the communication between people in the project is done in several channels not connected to each other: mailing list, GnomeLive wiki and IRC channels. All three of them treat all text as just plain text, meaning the computer doesn't provide us tools for specific content such as brainstorming, ideas, plans, schedules, etc. Loomio doesn't provide all of these things, but it's a great tool for a community to use for managing ideas and decisions. What do you think? Anatoly ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: loomio
I emailed the company regarding the availability of the source. They don't have the link on the website, but the code is available. (from r...@loomio.org) Loomio is on github: github.com/loomio/loomio http://github.com/loomio/loomio It will be great to hear how you get on with a local instance. I hope you can understand we have really limited resources to support local instances, but our docs are slowly improving to make it easier :) If it would be more convenient for you we'd be more than happy to set you up with an account on our hosted platform: just fill in this form: loomio.org/request_new_group http://loomio.org/request_new_group I imagine it would be useful for deciding on designs/various issues that come up. I don't know if it would be more useful to have a single group for all of GNOME, or one for each GNOME project that's interested. Sriram, while I agree many problems would be alleviated with more volunteer time, I've witnessed multiple instances in the past 6 months where decisions were not made democratically, despite a clear lack of consensus. Most recently, there were a great deal of changes to the gnome-shell All Applications view very late in the 3.8 schedule, well after code freeze, and despite visible disagreement. Loomio seems to offer an intuitive way of seeing how controversial a change is. And certainly, GNOME has gotten a lot of flack from the larger Free Software community for controversial changes. Loomio also seems like it would be a more accessible way for more people to get involved and provide feedback on potential decisions. Free Software means freedom, and having a more open and democratic decision-making process would do much to make this freedom more tangible for more people. On 04/14/2013 08:18 PM, Sriram Ramkrishna wrote: I looked at this and it seems quite interesting. The one problem I see is that this would subsume our current mailing list structure. We would have to bring this in house so that people could see what the decisions are and why. Overall, I think it's a good way to take conversations out of IRC and making it formal on such a structure. But it doesn't seem like they have released the code yet. In any case, what problem are we exactly trying to solve here? Most of the problems we have is related to our time schedules as volunteers. This is mostly solved by adding more people to the project. sri On Sun, Apr 14, 2013 at 1:36 AM, ?? ? tomback...@gmail.com mailto:tomback...@gmail.com wrote: Hello, I found a tool for collaborative decision making and brainstorming called loomio: https://www.loomio.org/ It's open for private beta, and I think Gnome, as a community project, can really benefit from using it. Currently the communication between people in the project is done in several channels not connected to each other: mailing list, GnomeLive wiki and IRC channels. All three of them treat all text as just plain text, meaning the computer doesn't provide us tools for specific content such as brainstorming, ideas, plans, schedules, etc. Loomio doesn't provide all of these things, but it's a great tool for a community to use for managing ideas and decisions. What do you think? Anatoly ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org mailto:desktop-devel-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: loomio
On Sun, 2013-04-14 at 20:53 -0400, Hashem Nasarat wrote: [...] Sriram, while I agree many problems would be alleviated with more volunteer time, I've witnessed multiple instances in the past 6 months where decisions were not made democratically, despite a clear lack of consensus. Most recently, there were a great deal of changes to the gnome-shell All Applications view very late in the 3.8 schedule, well after code freeze, and despite visible disagreement. Loomio seems to offer an intuitive way of seeing how controversial a change is. If I’d asked people what they wanted, they would have asked for a better horse -- Henry Ford [1] Software development is not a democracy. Decisions are taken by people who actually develop the software. Comments might or might not be welcomed depending of several factors (politeness, pertinence, reputation, data, etc.). Some decisions have proven better with the time, some others don't and get fixed (or tried a different path). In the development cycle there are plenty of opinions of people (including developers) who have not tried them. Some of them are still valuable, but without real data (not anecdotes) is hard to convince anybody and require to make a good case. At the end of the day, you have to convince people doing the work, who also are actual users of what they develop. [1] Although there does not seem evidence he really said that, you get the point. Another example you can find it http://bergie.iki.fi/blog/no-smartphones/ -- Germán Poo-Caamaño http://calcifer.org/ signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: loomio
On Sun, Apr 14, 2013 at 7:53 PM, Germán Póo-Caamaño g...@gnome.org wrote: On Sun, 2013-04-14 at 20:53 -0400, Hashem Nasarat wrote: [...] Sriram, while I agree many problems would be alleviated with more volunteer time, I've witnessed multiple instances in the past 6 months where decisions were not made democratically, despite a clear lack of consensus. Most recently, there were a great deal of changes to the gnome-shell All Applications view very late in the 3.8 schedule, well after code freeze, and despite visible disagreement. Loomio seems to offer an intuitive way of seeing how controversial a change is. If I’d asked people what they wanted, they would have asked for a better horse -- Henry Ford [1] Software development is not a democracy. Decisions are taken by people who actually develop the software. Comments might or might not be welcomed depending of several factors (politeness, pertinence, reputation, data, etc.). Germán is right. In free software land, the module maintainer is the ultimate dictator of what goes into the code base. So the decision falls upon the maintainer and a trusted cohort or two. In which case, decisions are fairly easy to come to and you don't really need decision software. Marketing and others non-coding teams tends to require more consensus mostly because sometimes money and tangible resources are involved so decisions are done jointly. That's where such things would be interesting. So for instance, your suggestion of decision software might quite well for the Board when trying to document consensus, but it doesn't map well to the technical culture of free software. sri ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
