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
signature.asc
Description: This is a digitally signed message part.
_______________________________________________ Plasma-devel mailing list Plasma-devel@kde.org https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/plasma-devel