[Ayatana] How Mozilla does community-driven open source design

[David Siegel <david.siegel@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

See http://tinyurl.com/2ebzvww for an article on Mozilla's community-driven design efforts. An interesting caveat from the article:
> Some commentators doubt that an open source approach can be fruitfully 
> applied to design. "There are plenty of good ideas, but they don't work 
> well together with the real world," says Jakob Nielsen, principal at the
>  Nielsen Norman Group in Fremont, Calif. Open source encourages the 
> addition of new solutions and ideas. In design, says Nielsen, "the 
> brilliant idea can be the one unifying idea that can take away 10 other 
> ideas."
Can anyone cite an example of a "unifying idea that can take away 10 other ideas" from the Ayatana list, or are we generating "plenty of good ideas [that] don't work well together"? What can we learn from Mozilla's efforts in this arena?

Mozilla's communiy-design epicenter: 
http://mozillalabs.com/conceptseries/

David