With all the rants flying about involving Canonical, Red Hat, GNOME, cabals, design etc. I’ve seen a lot of misconceptions in blog posts and comments about how design is being done in the GNOME project that really need clearing up. Specially the claim that Red Hat is the only one working in this area and working in a cabal with decisions being set in stone.
Here’s a list of some contributors who contributed significantly to GNOME design in the recent years (or even longer) who are not coders and do not work for Red Hat.
- Allan Day (volunteer)
- Lapo Calamandrei (volunteer)
- Garrett LeSage (Novell)
- Andreas Nilsson (Mozilla)
- Kalle Persson (volunteer)
- Andy Fitzsimon (Novell)
- Vinicius Depizzol (volunteer)
- Jakub Steiner (sure, Red Hat, but he did the majority of his work not working for them)
- Calum Benson (Sun/Oracle)
- Matthew Paul Thomas (Canonical)
- Nick Richards (Intel)
- Hylke Bons (me, Intel)
- I’m probably forgetting a few… apologies, but the point has been made.
We hang out in #gnome-design on irc.gnome.org, along with the Red Hat designers and great GNOME hackers. There is no cabal. All design decisions happen in the open. We do not feel like competing with each other, but we want to collaborate and have fun on creating the future instead. Join us! 
Without contrasting that to those who _are_ coders and/or Red Hat, your point is not strong.
Also, Gnome IRC channels are not archived. If transparency/openness in the decision process is the goal, you might consider doing things differently.
@Jimmy Nobody stops anyone from archiving the channel, and maybe that’s something we should do. Most of the important decisions are also posted to the planet.
Contrasting against the number of coders doesn’t make much sense. Firstly because this post is about design in GNOME and not implementation. Secondly, designers in FOSS projects are usually a minority (but I think that relatively speaking, GNOME has a large design team). I can give you the names of all the Red Hat designers I’ve worked with though: They are Máirín Duffy, Jeremy Perry, and Jon McCann.
Great post, Hylke.
I ran my commit chart tool on gnome-shell git. I think it’s pretty and somewhat interesting:
http://banshee.fm/~gburt/commit-charts/gnome-shell.html
Yes, please think about archiving irc log activity. If not all of it… set aside regularly schedule meeting times or “drop-by” discussion times and archive the logs of those meetings.
-jef
Jef, the GNOME 3 team actually has had regular scheduled weekly meetings. I saw them advertised on twitter and on mailing lists and planet. They were on Wednesdays and were called ‘office hours.’ I do not know if they are still running but I have dropped in the #gnome-design channel a few times during them, they were friendly and easy to engage in.
While I appreciate Hylke’s acknowledging the microscopic bit of work I’ve done (I wrote up a usability test plan for GNOME shell that I didn’t execute
and I’ve done very minor icon design work) I really haven’t participated much at all, but I have always found it easy to drop into #gnome-design, lurk for a bit, and drop in on the office hours to check in on things. Folks in the channel have been very responsive and very helpful the few times I’ve needed help when I needed to create an icon and I wanted to make sure it met their styling / specs / vision.
A searchable set of IRC logs would be nice, but honestly I work on tons of projects that don’t have this and get by.
Máirín Duffy ,
If this were a project that was not having a very public dispute I would agree that such logging of discussion would be less important. But that’s not the current lay of the land. Without blaming any particular person…or saying any accusations that have been levelled are accurate…damage has been done to the perception of trust. Logs of the meetings would help tell the story of the process at work and make it harder for misconceptions to spread.
Food for thought.
Hi Jef,
I just don’t think optimising collaboration to enable the kind of tit-for-tat that is going on right now is real healthy.
Log ‘em to make it easier for new designers to read the backlog and jump in, sure. Log ‘em so that people can make pointed blog posts at each other and accuse each other of x or y? Nah.
I would like to see some UX testing based on which GS designers took their decisions on.
Not trying to be a smartass or something, just interested
(Just don’t tell me there wasn’t any!)
Máirín Duffy,
Let me be clear. I don’t want to see logs to make accusations. I want there to be a written record of a process in action to prevent miscommunication and misunderstanding to fester in the minds of people on the edges of a process. I’m thinking in terms of prevention and early mitigation.
And to be clearer I think the your thinking is a great proactive community building reason for having the same sort of transparency. Yes! Absolutely providing regular meeting logs with the goal of making it easier for new designers to jump in is great! I think your reason is a far more fundamental and deeper beneficial a goal which satisfies my point of view without putting my concerns front and center. Please continue to be the optimist that trumps my cynicism. If you would allow me the luxury of a bridge burning analogy…
I’m thinking about how to retrofit a bridge that has been damaged by fire.
You are thinking about how to build a bridge that can’t be so easily burned.
-jef