[CREATE] Libre Graphics Whatever - charter prototype

[Andreas Vox]

> Date: Wed, 02 Jun 2010 15:14:38 +0200
> From: Gregory Pittman <gpittman at iglou.com>
> Subject: Re: [CREATE] Libre Graphics Whatever - charter prototype
> To: create at lists.freedesktop.org
> Message-ID: <4C06593E.4030404 at iglou.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
> 
> On 06/01/2010 12:36 PM, Jos? Cruz wrote:
> > Hi! I'm agree with Jon about the differents classes of membership. We
> are a
> > small company (just two persons) in the graphic design world, using
> only libre
> > software, and I think it is interesting to bring more professionals
> (wich are
> > intensive users) to FLOSS.
> 
> In the vein of discussions about either insufficient or excessive
> "power" that might come about from various schemes of membership, we
> can
> consider that there can be some kind of whole-cloth membership for all
> those interested as individuals, then we can have the association also
> consist inside as a number of Sections, each of which could pertain to
> a
> subgroup, eg, artists/designers, as opposed to another section of
> developers, and others.
> 
> The reason for suggesting this is to find a way around simply
> recreating
> within the organization the same thing we have in the outside world,
> where non-programmer users complain that the developers won't listen to
> their needs/requests, and developers complain that users don't
> understand the constraints of the development process.
> 
> This isn't to suggest that a User Section could not have within it some
> developers or that a Developer Section could not have users -- if
> nothing else, there are those who could legitimately claim both kinds
> of
> activities, as we saw at this year's LGM. Furthermore, one might be a
> member of more than one section.
> 
> A section of users might discuss among themselves various feature
> requests or user operability issues so that the best, most coherent
> final requests might be presented to the Developer Section and
> projects.
> Developers might discuss the feedback from users and the direction
> individual projects are taking to propose improved interoperability,
> then solicit feedback from the User Section to see if these seem worth
> pursuing.
> 

So you propose, in order to avoid misunderstandings between users and developers, to keep them in their separate subgroups / sections? I think that goes against the purpose of what we want to achieve with LGM.

As a developer I enjoy direct contact with users when they have feature requests. It's also good to have a developer on board when discussing new features: non-programmers might ask for things which just aren't possible or - more often - ask for things that could be much simpler done if they dared to ask for it (eg. ask for a better hyphenation dialog when a direct canvas-based hyphenation tool might work even better).

> This might also enhance future LGMs by naturally leading to some
> planned
> BOF-like meetings for individual sections, so that fewer things take
> place in such an ad hoc way.

Don't over-organize BoF's; they have to fall the way the wind blows them.

Just my €.02

/Andreas