Open source community and design

[From Gobby document: other-community-and-design]

Ivanka Majic: A year ago Canonical's designers were perceived as quiet and private. We've been trying to open up.
 (fluteflute: I see the Canonical Design Blog as a great success)
Thorsten Wilms: The Ayatana mailing list is noisy.
mpt: If you're doing lots of design you have less time to post on the mailing list, and vice versa.
Martin Owens: Some designers are scared of the mailing list.
Ivanka: We have too many communication channels. What type of involvement is practical or reasonable?
Thorsten: It's unhelpful for the ayatana and ubuntu-art@ lists to be separate.
mpt: For example, the sound menu feedback that was posted to ubuntu-art@.
Martin: What should be the scope? Are wallpapers and icons relevant?
Andreas Nilsson: Visual design vs. interaction design.
Ivanka: Ths maps to ubuntu-art@ vs. ayatana@.
Vish: Canonical designers post to ubuntu-art@ about once every six months (for the countdown banner). This leaves no clarity on what needs doing, what people can do or are allowed to do.
Martin: LoCo teams etc often need bits of artwork.
Matthew McGowan: Where is the list of artwork things people want done?
Vish: Maybe this could be needs-artwork tagged bug reports, like needs-design. Or an art.ubuntu.com site.
<JanCBorchardt> the state of design / development is not clearly communicated to the community. On the Ayatana ML, mockups are thrown around for problems that have already been solved.
Martin: Maybe this could work like the MOTUs: some people have upload rights etc, others don't.
Ivanka: How can we measure success? Next UDS what do we want to have accomplished?
Clearly identify tasks
Get Tasks done
Thorsten: Increase quality and quantity of design efforts and outcomes.
Close gap between artwork and design team
mpt: It's easy for Canonical designers to forget that there are other people who could do things.
Jan-Christoph Borchardt: maybe there should be posts about opportunities for help, on design.canonical.com for example
Martin: Disenfranchisement of artists and designers.
Andreas: Gnome set up a wiki page with requests for small bits of design.
?: Use SparkleShare / gDocuments / more open tools.
Thorsten: Design Thinking should be spread.
Oren: Design challenge
Less 'develop a wallpaper' more about solving a problem together. A design problem to resolve.
Education and mentoring.
duanedesign: The Beginners Team is working on an Art Focus Group(mentor program)
?: OpenIDEO did something with open design. Introduce a design challenge.
Matthew McGowan: With Bazaar, you can branch a project, make revisions, propose a merge. Could the same transparent model work for art and design, e.g. icon sets? Designers could comment on changes / provide reasons. Spark open discussion.
Robert Collins: We'd be delighted to have someone implement image diffs in Launchpad.
<RobOakes> I would think that a framework for requests and a system for helping to match potential designers with developers. Almost a bulletin board type system. Could it be possible to build out Launchpad to support more visual collaboration?
j_baer: One thing we are desparately missing is a process and a method to track artwork requests. Something that expands on the Launchpad blueprint process.
j_baer: There is a need for a central repository of artwork related tasks and an on-line tool to manage this list. :)
Ivanka: The barrier to entry for any tool needs to be low.
?: OpenTTD <http://www.openttd.org/en/> had a tool to track the redrawing of their artwork.
Tools: The barrier to entry needs to be low
Open TTD
Design hub: Sparkleshare
Launchpad
First step:
Common to-do list
Design team to create briefs and add them
But Limited way of working for Canonical to brief community
The rest of the community working together important
Andreas: There is an image diff tool in SparkleShare <http://sparkleshare.org/>, SparkleDiff (still there?).
Ivanka: We need to make sure that some things on this list actually get done, that we don't just forget about them after UDS. Alejandra?
- design challenges
- branch/merge process
- cue of tasks
J_baer: The community wants to contribute in meaningful ways to add value to Ubuntu. :) Much of the current effort is ad-hoc. Another impediment is the process is confusing with multiple tools.
<Kaleo> Mairin Duffy has interesting ideas about remote developer-designer and designer-designer collaboration: http://mairin.wordpress.com/2010/03/01/the-one-where-the-designers-ask-for-a-pony/
Ivanka: For a particular project it's often not obvious how to help with its design.
Ability to see what Otto is working on... his starting point and endpoint. To see the process+
+Once people can see the actual process, they will find ways to communicate about it.
Oren Horev: Lots of alternatives could drive generative design.
Ivanka: Otto has spent lots of time of artwork, little time on guidelines.
Jan: Design guidelines / open process is important, they are the source code for the artwork.
To do list: Maybe tag bugs in launchpad?

Work items:
[ivanka] Work out who needs to do what, this cycle, to improve the process, and add work items here: TODO