On Tue, 2012-12-25 at 22:32 -0800, DuBois, Scott L. wrote:
I have one question at the moment which I would be delighted to get your advice on Richard? What could the Artwork Team have done better or direction should have taken to be more focused and less chaotic in the design process?
That's fairly easy to answer. The process has become far less transparent in these days than they have in the past. Ideas or processes are documented in non-transparent ways, such as using Google Docs or other tools that have limited access. At the same time, decisions and plans are announced after some apparent discussion somewhere for which the decisions themselves have been challenged because there was no proverbial "paper trail" to show how such decisions were arrived at. Attempts by those to ask for the paper trail have been met with stonewalling and refusal to disclose, and to this day these requests still have not been fulfilled. The point of transparency isn't about democracy, meritocracy or whatever -ocracy you follow. It's about making it visible so that others who *might* be able to contribute in some way have a general understanding of the process and why such process became the preferred method. If you're blindly jumping into a process at say Point C without seeing how Point A, B and D happened, you're likely to make things worse than better, and your contribution will have a lesser impact or might not even be used at all. Open source contribution comes in many forms. Some are by hard-core contributors that work daily on a particular project, and others by "drive-by" contribution. The latter being when someone happens to come along, sees very visible information about a current process, piece of software, etc. and might make a one-time contribution in a small but very big way. The sum total of these drive-by contributions can add up to a very wonderful end product. But only if the process itself is transparent, visible and easily accessible. In short, if you have a process or idea or proposal, document it on the wiki. If you want to discuss something, use the mailing list. If you have a discussion on IRC, by all means do, but then push it to the ML. You want to use tools that are widely visible by anyone, not just people who are "already there." Or you'll never get the drive-by contributions I mentioned earlier, at least not effective contributions. Bryen -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-artwork+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-artwork+owner@opensuse.org