Fops, I have been thinking for some time now about the difficulty of doing distributed design; i.e., co-ordinating design thinking in OS projects with widely separated designers, and others who may like to make suggestions. For a start, I think that intermittent email communication is inadequate to the task. Compare the situation with designers sitting in the same room, able to walk over to talk to one another about design ideas, gather round a white board, and generally kick ideas around in real time.
While I am not suggesting that anything much is likely to change in the current situation, I think that one of the lessons here is the importance of chat. This is particularly difficult with wide geographical distribution, but I have done it on occasions with a group spread from California through New York and London to Tokyo and Brisbane. The major hurdle is finding any times when everyone can be available. Even when not everyone could be there, logs of the conversation could be very valuable. The other critical component is drawings. If I had the choice of unlimited text or drawings with minimal annotations for communicating design ideas, I would take the drawings every time. I'm not talking here about formal techniques like UML, which are design documentation tools, but the informal scribblings which are universal when programmers - sorry, engineers - get together to talk design, and which are the basic tool of all of my design thinking. What would be good is to combine the two. I.e., to chat on the one hand, and on the other to be able to use a vector drawing tool with a distributed canvas, which others could annotate or modify in real time, during the chat session. Does anything like that exist? Peter --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]