[Panel-devel] KDE4 front-end papers

[Zbigniew Braniecki]

Hi. I had a discussion with Aaron on his blog (
http://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=7615673&postID=114537056816755856),
but did not get the ultimate answer to my biggest concern.

Aaron stated that KDE team has prepared the full UI and feature set related
documents before they started actually implementing them. That's awesome! It
means that there are documents describing what will be the feature set of
KDE4. What will be the UI of the KDE, cases of workflow, target group,
challenges, maybe there are charts, mockups, templates, there should be some
docs about user interaction...

The only problem from my point of view is that those docs are not known to
community - including myself - and thus people actually don't know what KDE4
will be. And this problem is WAY wider than just curiosity of small group of
people - it's about a reliability, predictibility, and cathedral vs bazaar
problem. Can anyone tell me where those docs are?

No company/project can currently rely on KDE4 because they don't know what
it'll be. I assume that KDE team shared their vision with Mandriva, maybe
Linspire, maybe some other distros which are totally kdeish. But noone else
can prepare his own plans in tie with KDE4.
More, it's users not only has TOTALLY NO influence on what KDE4 will be -
since they were not invited to the discussion about KDE4 UI and feature set,
but also they even cannot predict what will KDE4 be. So, Joe Average, who
wants to use KDE, cannot say if he will want to use KDE4, because he doesn't
know. And, against all good habits of Open projects, KDE team seems to focus
on "big wow" instead of "release early, release often" method.

The only reason for not publishing those documents (assuming that those docs
are not published, and it's not only me who missed them) I can find is that
it could start a laud discussion. But from my experience, the only reason
for which people refuse to know other opinions is when they're afraid that
they can be wrong.

Also, from my discussion with KDE team members on the IRC channel, I got the
picture of the project which doesn't believe that the community can help.
It's a blind circle. If you don't let them help, they cannot do this. And if
they cannot do this, you get no help.

Aaron said during that comment thread, that if I want to help I can join one
of the various projects - Oxygen, KDE docs, KDE QA... It's a problem. You
should not require people to be a part of the project, any project, to let
them help you. If Zeldman or Mayer would like to suggest you improvements to
your website, would you ask them to join KDE Web Dev project first? If Jakob
Nielsen would like to spend a few minutes and point you out the major flaws
in your KDE4 UI plan, would you require him to join KDE4 project?

The best moment, to let the plan get under the heavy discussion is just
passing by. Once you already created the libraries, you will have to spend
ten times more effort to redesign it if someone will point you a flaw than
if you'd listen first, before acting.



Examples of UI/Feature set docs:
1) http://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox2
2) http://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox:Home_Page
3) http://wiki.flock.com/index.php?title=Cardinal:Specification

Greetings
Zbigniew Braniecki
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