A somewhat liberal summary of the meeting: Attendees: * John Baer * K. Vishnoo Charan Reddy * Ivanka Majik * Thorsten Wilms * Kenneth Wimer
As a community team, we do not work for Canonical, but will try to work with or rather alongside the Design Team. Ivanka will be our point of contact for the Canonical Design Team (but we shall only fill her inbox after taking some deep breaths! ;). Regarding gaining influence on official artwork or being seen as partner of the Canonical Design Team, we think that quality should precede demand for equality. That means, if we want to be taken serious, we have to deliver! Kenneth Wimer doesn't work for Canonical anymore. He is still the leader of the Artwork Team, at least as far as Launchpad is concerned. He see's his future role here in helping with coordination, helping people with specific questions and mentoring. Kenneth stated that every time the team had attempted a larger project on itself and tried to take direction from canonical it had failed, mainly due to lack of explanation about decisions as well as lack of involvement in the decision making process. That's why he thinks we need to stick to the things we are good at, like the photo contest and other smaller things until we have the resources and structure to accomplish larger tasks We all agreed on a need for mentoring and guidance to help people to gain the experience and skills required to tackle artwork/design tasks. Kenneth stated that the Oxygen project started with just two artists, but by finding community members interested in learning they expanded the group by teaching them. The artwork team should be running in such a way that the whole community can make better use of it. Ivanka said that it seems to her that specific things identified by Canonical should be triaged and picked up in the same way as a request from a loco team. There should be more of a presence of our efforts so that we could attract more people and 'service' more projects (like apps) or create marketing materials for loco teams and things like that. Ivanka thinks it would be great if there was a leader who could match requests to people, amongst other things. We agreed that in cases like the Ubuntu Screenshots task, where the requirements and stakeholders are unclear, no team member should have to play detective. Instead, the task/specification is considered frozen, until the required information gets delivered. Regarding gaining insight into the workings of the Canonical Design Team, it has been stated that as much as possible is already being put out via the design.canonical.com blog and further information can be found in Launchpad reports. Reporting on everything would take too much time and there simply isn't the bandwidth to communicate what goes on in a team of full time employees. Their scope is actually a bit larger than Ubuntu and there may be business interests involved. We are assured that some of the work is just boring ;) For cases like LibreOffice, we think that invitations are fine on our list, but that it's up to any individual to follow or not. Specifications for such tasks should happen inside the upstream projects. We can have a section on our Specs page for listing projects where we "endorse" getting involved. -- Thorsten Wilms thorwil's design for free software: http://thorwil.wordpress.com/ -- ubuntu-art mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-art
