[Sugar-devel] Sugar UI Dictator

[Christian Marc Schmidt]

Whoever ends up as dictator: I'd still love to stay involved as an advisor.
I'd volunteer to throw my name into the hat for election if not for lack of
time. In any case, I agree that it would be great (and necessary) to have a
dedicated UX person who could keep the design up-to-date and consistent with
our experiential goals.

Christian

On Tue, Nov 9, 2010 at 12:27 PM, Michael Stone <michael at laptop.org> wrote:

>
> On Tue, 9 Nov 2010 at 03:12:41 +0000, Martin Dengler wrote:
>
>> On Mon, Nov 08, 2010 at 07:49:19PM -0500, Bernie Innocenti wrote:
>>
>>> On Fri, 2010-10-29 at 10:02 +0100, Martin Dengler wrote:
>>>
>>>> IMO a decent justification and a willingness to update the affected
>>>> wiki pages - including the HIG - to a similar or better standard as
>>>> what existed before should almost be enough for me.
>>>>
>>>> What I'm worried about is the HIG that exists - incomplete as it is -
>>>> is being chipped away and we're left with UI that's justified by
>>>> nothing but a patchwork of ad-hoc decisions made by very different
>>>> people with very different users in mind.
>>>>
>>>
>>> While I strongly believe in the power of loosely-managed
>>> volunteer-driven development, distributed authority doesn't seem to work
>>> equally well when it comes to human interface design.
>>>
>>> Good design implies one consistent vision, which is hard to obtain
>>> collaboratively. A case-by-case decision process results in either
>>> inconclusive discussions or UI inconsistency.
>>>
>>> It might work better if we agreed to delegate all design decisions to
>>> one clever dictator
>>>
>>
>> Great idea.
>>
>> Sebastian is calling for a HIG update as part of his SLOBs platform -
>> perhaps the new HIG Dictator should commit to doing that in some fixed
>> period of time?
>>
>> Failing one Dictator, erm, seizing power, perhaps we could just agree
>> on some group of people who will be the dictators, and not revisit
>> that for a while.
>>
>
> Agreeing on small group of people seems easy to arrange. Here's a strawman
> proposal for how that might look:
>  1. Per [1], the Oversight Board creates an ad-hoc 3-person UI Committee.
>
>  2. The initial voting members will be mtd, garycmartin, and ____ (a third
>     person to be determined).
>
>  3. The initial term will be for six months.
>
> Next, there are details that we need to agree upon. For example, what does
> the
> committee do and at what rate does it do it? Another strawman:
>
>  4. The committee will meet as needed in order to address Queries received
> by
>     any of its voting members.
>
>  5. The committee will meet within 2 weeks of receiving a Query.
>
>  6. Proposed Responses will be accepted by the committee by majority vote.
>
>  7. Minutes, received Queries, proposed Responses, and related discussion
> will
>     be archived and organized by the Committee Secretary on the wiki.
>
> Finally, there some harder questions that I don't have easy answers for:
>  a) Who do we expect to do the work of formulating responses to Queries?
>
>  b) How will we make the committee successful and fun? In particular, how
> do
>     we expect to organize the performance of the work that is necessary to
>     prepare for and to follow through on the committee's decisions?
>
>     (i.e., who's actually going to go out to collect experience reports,
>     to perform user testing, or to develop prototypes when the Committee
>     determines that these actions are necessary in order to properly
> respond
>     to a Query?)
>
>  c) What kinds of disputes and/or grievances do we anticipate and how do we
>     expect to resolve them?
>
> Thoughts?
>
> Regards,
>
> Michael
>
> [1]: http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_Labs/Governance#Committees
>



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