unity-design team mailing list archive

[Thorsten Wilms <t_w_@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, 2010-06-08 at 17:03 +0200, Sense Hofstede wrote:

> It is my opinion that Ayatana should be made more community developer
> friendly. This means two things:
> 1. Make it clear to the community that and how they can contribute
> code (or artwork and documentation?) to the Ayatana projects. This
> could de done via a separate home for the Ayatana project (e.g. a
> slick <http://ayatana.ubuntu.com/> page that tells people what Ayatana
> is, what it means for users and what it means for developers. The page
> then could link to information for people who want to use Ayatana in
> their applications and another page explaining how to contribute to
> Ayatana.

Not sure about having a sub-domain. People have to find out about it
somewhere else in the first place, anyway. "How to get involved" and
"what could I work on that will be actually useful" are of interest on a
wider scope than just Ayatana.

If you look at
http://www.ubuntu.com/community
There's
 * Developers
 * Documentation
 * Artwork
 * Support
 * Bug Squad

Aside of that it should be Developers, Writers, ... or Development,
Documentation ..., there's currently no slot for UX people.

"Artwork" suddenly becomes "Design", if you go to
http://www.ubuntu.com/community/get-involved

Now compare:
http://fedoraproject.org/en/join-fedora
(Do follow one of the links)

http://en.opensuse.org/How_to_Participate
Is kinda sabotaged, though.


The current Ayatana description on https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Ayatana reads
(I had my fingers in there):
---
Ayatana is a collective effort to improve the user experience of
software in and for Ubuntu. It encompasses a number projects started by
Canonical and is open for feedback, ideas and initiatives from the
community. Activities reach from problem definition, research and
conception to implementation. 

The focus of the project is to improve the perception and presentation
of information in the desktop, hence the name; the Buddhist term for a
sense base or sense sphere. Specific areas of interest that take
priority over everything else are: notifications, indicators, window
management, launcher, places, settings and menus. 
---

and:

---
Contact / Getting Involved:
The first point of contact for getting involved is the Ayatana mailing
list at http://launchpad.net/~ayatana (archives at
https://lists.launchpad.net/ayatana/). 

You may join the Team IRC channel at #ayatana on irc.FreeNode.net. We
recommend the XChat-client (XChat Howto).
---

Additions and improvements welcome! 


> You could summarise the two points above in one word: communication. I
> know that especially the design team has made progress on this, but it
> remains something all in-company teams should pay attention to. I know
> it is not always easy to do it properly without an angry mob burning
> you down and I know it takes a lot of time, but it is tremendously
> important to do it anyway. (I'm not saying that you're doing a bad job
> at communicating, I'm just saying that -- like always -- there is some
> room for improvement.)

Throwing infrastructure is not always an actual solution and there's
always the who's-gonna-write it problem, but I still think a system that
combines some wiki and tracker features could replace pain with joy.

It should track problems/briefings, connect them to research
documentation and concepts (where a concept is a proposal of how to
solve the problem or accomplish the mission). To be continued with
implementations.

A potential contributor should be enabled to get there,
 * specify their skills and interests,
 * see peers with similar profiles,
 * get a list of briefings and tasks that match,
 * see what is being worked on.
...

None of that should ever include having to deal with wiki markup,
feeling like you have to become an information architect to find the
right place or keeping lists of projects up-to-date manually.


-- 
Thorsten Wilms

thorwil's design for free software:
http://thorwil.wordpress.com/