[Sugar-devel] Sugar UI Dictator

[C. Scott Ananian]

[more thoughts, again apologies for not making these shorter]

Failing a good candidate, I think "do no harm" should be the motto --
concentrate on the (many!) design-related tasks which *don't* involve
making design decisions.  Briefly: organizing/maintaining the specs,
collecting/collating issues that need design review or redesign, and
facilitating outside review for these.  (For example, if a design
class at a university were to make Sugar their term project, what
documents would you give them, what opinions would you want them to
hear, what tasks would you want them to consider? In what form would
you want their report?  Which outside voices would you want to guide
them/review their results?  There's a lot of facilitation work to be
done there, meetings to organize, documents to write, patches to
summarize, etc.)

I think a self-appointed Design Dictator Committee composed entirely
of developers, some who may well have written portions of the patches
under review, can easily do more harm than good.

I'd rather see an all-developer "Designer Enablement Committee" whose
job was to maintain design docs, collect issues for review, and
generally make it possible to have a productive one-hour once-a-month
design review meeting with the best *designers* we could get to do it.
 (Or once-a-release-cycle, as Christoph would have it.)

If the problem is that the good designers don't have enough time, I
don't think the solution is to use whoever we can find who has the
time.
  --scott

-- 
                         ( http://cscott.net/ )