Hi all I have written twice to this list in the last cycle hoping to help people distill ideas into productive work away from the default them. It hasn't really worked... As a team, I think our actual (polished, published) output is a tiny fraction of what we *could* achieve. We need to investigate why, and fix it.
Here are the reasons I think we aren't performing as we could. Add yours, tell me I'm wrong, suggest a way to fix them :) 1. Design by committee is very difficult to get right: Dan Winship puts it nicely here: http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2006-February/msg00115.html so we will get further if we have _leaders who make decisions_ and _carry their vision through to completion_ 2. There are too many people and ideas here to make producing a single theme rewarding or sensible. We need not to get caught up with 'default' and work on great artwork. If we _did_ make one theme that everyone contributed to, it would likely suffer from the difficulties described in (1) anyway. 3. The process for getting feedback about work that might be good as a default theme is slow and sufficiently ill defined to make working specifically towards 'being default' a dangerous and potentially frustrating thing. Thus, it is better to allow those with close contact with sabdfl to help the team on these aspects, but not make them the central focus. 4. We need to meet hard deadlines and handle our packaging from the very beginning of the release process. If you make some artwork, and tick all the packaging boxes _your work will be eligible to be in Universe_. Don't expect the packaging to magically occur - we have to see ourselves just like any other part of the Ubuntu machine, we obey the same rules, use the same tools, and have the same goals. As I've said before - we've solved these problems in the past by having 'theme teams'. Here is an email I wrote about these for the last cycle: https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-art/2008-January/004821.html I wanted to copy it in verbatim, but that seemed excessive. If you think I'm right about the 4 points above, please try and read that email and skim the responses. Can anyone tell me why we didn't get more uptake? Are people only here to make the default theme? It comes down to this: If you have an idea for a theme, YOU need to push it forward, YOU need to make it happen, YOU need to package it, put it through REVU, use Launchpad...etc. kwwii deals with the official theme and liaises with sabdfl, but ANY good theme can go into the repositories. After all, if the default theme was to change radically, it would need to be to a theme with proven success, packages and maintenance. NetworkManager was an optional extra before it was default ;) So, I suggest we stop worrying about 'default' for now - and go and enjoy doing some great, original design. Make it work, make it available, and watch as people all around the world choose to use it! It can happen :) Who (Jonathan Austin) -- ubuntu-art mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-art
