Survey to prepare 'Next Workspace Iteration' sprint

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Sunday, June 3, 2012 19:25:05 Björn Balazs wrote:
> I have tried to build upon the vision formulated by Aaron. Target audience

these are the emails i really struggle with writing.

on the one hand, i'm really excited that people have the enthusiasm to do this 
kind of work and are putting the effort in to make it happen. i don't want to 
blunt that one bit. in fact, i want to encourage it.

on the other hand, i'm confident that this approach will result in a train 
wreck.

so i'm suck in a position where i want to encourage the motivation but 
discourage the application of it. it is hard to do both at the same time, and 
i hope i don't screw it up completely :)

so ... why do i think this will be a train wreck?

for the same reason i should never, ever be asked by the engineer responsible 
for building a new bridge in my city how i think it should be built. i don't 
know. it isn't my area of expertise. i'll come up with SOMETHING for them if 
they really want me to, but my answer is going to be pretty naive. there is no 
way i can do better because i lack both the training and that data needed to 
formulate great input.

that describes 99.9% of our users when it comes to these kinds of questions.

over the years i've found that when i observe, for instance, that people have 
lots of files many will say "no i don't." then i walk them through all the files 
they have: emails, music, video, pictures they took with their camera and/or 
phone, bookmarks, ebooks, work/school docs ... it's usually pretty fun to 
actually tally it up with them because most people do not realize the extent 
of their data.

and that's the easiest and most obvious part of the sentence "I have huge 
number of files, devices, people I know, network services I use and I use my 
computer for multiple and very different tasks (e.g. work, entertainment, 
personal communication, school)."


next: when you ask someone what they want, if you don't deliver it, you will 
disappoint them. so this survey is askking for ideas that are probably 
unworkable while simultaneously setting up our most ardent users for 
disappointment all at once. :/


it gets better though: someone may want the best twitter+facebook platform 
EVARRR!!!!111!! but that may simply not turn us on as developers. we may find 
that maybe 1 or 2 of us will work on it. and maybe they won't even understand 
why the "best twitter+facebook platform evar" is useful or important, they 
just do it for their love of our users.

the result will be flat, uninspired and probably not as good as if they were 
making something with a philosophy they understood.

the opposite direction is a lot easier: formulate a vision, understand it, 
know it, breath it, love it ... our users will too.

so IMHO and IME this is going about it in exactly the opposite direction if we 
want a great chance at good results.


in a phrase:

					this is not how to do it.

the upcoming sprint needs to, must be, driven by people who will be involved 
in making the solutions and who understand the challenges intimately and with 
a reasonable degree of topic appropriate competence.

so before we go and create problems for a project i've put a number of years 
into and am now trying to turn into a day job for myself and others .. let's 
discuss HOW to get the information we want before we start implementing such 
methods.

an even better starting point might be to discuss WHAT information we need.

or .. we could wait until the sprint starts. i can do a bit of an orientation 
via a google hangout with the attendees to point things in a reasonable 
direction. this is what we have done for the last 3 years, and tokamaks have 
been remarkably productive.



p.s. and why isn't this "Tokamak 5" and instead morphed into the nebulous 
"Next Workspace Iteration Sprint" which does nothing to build on the community 
platform we have going here, alienating just about everyone because it is 
neither known (and therefore comfortable) nor well defined (literally it means: 
we're doing something next .. iteratively .. in the workspace .. but what 
exactly?)

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
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