Creation of the kde-workspace team

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Thursday, October 27, 2011 13:01:09 Alex Fiestas wrote:
> With KDE morphed into a community of subcommunities we need to create the
> "Desktop" community so we can gather all people interested in the topic and
> work together to continue working in what we do best, offer a unified
> experience across all applications.

first the points of dissent, to get them out of the way:

i really do not want this named anything related to "workspace". we have 
worked very hard to get the name "workspace" separated from the applications 
and platform/frameworks. this is very important to our ability to communicate 
clearly about the applications and developer story, while simultaneously 
giving our efforts on plasma something of a firewall from the rest of the 
community.

i also do not think a mailing list should be set up specifically for this. 
given experience elsewhere, mailing list focused solutions deteriorate over 
time (often rapidly) with unhelpful conversation, even though all parties are 
well-meaning. the causal factors as far as i can tell are:

* too many who do not have the actual skills required get involved
* it easy to write an email
* real UX improvements need to be driven by storyboards, research, testing, 
use cases and use stories being created and shared
* most UX designers are not comfortable with mailing list centric solutions, 
due to a lack of familiarity with and/or experience with past experiencts

so mailing lists attract an undesirable mix of audience without having the 
right mix of high-bandwidth and structured tools at the heart of it. it is, 
after all, just a bunch of unstructured text.

ok, so.. the dissent part of this email is done :)

now agreements and support:

i think such a project will benefit KDE software immensley. it needs to be 
driven by people who will create change through action. 

i also believe it needs to have people who are tollerant to dealing with the 
wider KDE community from time to time; dismissing the wider community will 
only create barriers and prevent application of results. so it will need an 
ambassador who wears asbestos and a mighty pen :)

since i suggested not mailing list centric, how could this work, then? well, 
here's something i tried to set up some time ago[1]

	http://community.kde.org/Elegance

perhaps you can draw some inspiration from that as a model where people create 
proposals with all the information needed, they are discussed when ready and 
moved into "accepted" status and then advocated to the KDE community in 
general (probably best done in the form of patches). this is a process- rather 
than conversation-driven model, and certainly not the only way to do it. it is 
a way that i personally feel would have a better chance of success than a 
conversation-driven one.


[1] it was when i thought "ok, well, Plasma stuff is sort of on its own feet 
and i can concentrate on something new perhaps" (after which time the # of 
contributors shrank for various reasons and we got new things like QML and 
Active to take my attentions :)

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
humru othro a kohnu se
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43

KDE core developer sponsored by Qt Development Frameworks
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