At the same time, I also like the expression, “Patch first, ask questions later.” It’s almost a mantra in Inkscape. Too often have I seen creative, technically-solid ideas drowned in the bureaucracy of committee-itis. Don’t debate the merits of a given change, just put it in and see if it sticks. This doesn’t mean, “Roll stuff out without listening to feedback.” On the contrary, it means get the change into people’s hands, put it in front of them, and see what they think. Don’t hold back and over-analyze it before sharing. Share it soon. If it’s cool, every one will love it. If it’s buggy, it’ll be a priority to fix. If it sucks, they’ll says so and you can change directions on it before you officially release. This has worked well for Inkscape.

Now, I have to admit that all this works fine for Inkscape, but Inkscape isn’t a company. We don’t have to worry about making a profit, or people taking our best ideas, beating us to delivery, and stealing our clients.

(Answer: Ideally, it is decided by a democratic process.)

It’s the same problem that plagues pragmatism. Being pragmatic is all nice and good, but at the end of the day, you have to have goals underlying everything else. How do you decide what your goals are?

… Ubuntu suffers from heavy-handedness from top down. I’m not judging these ideas, but in a “democratic” environment priorities may have been different.

And while meritocracies can be good, they sometimes foster cultism where the loser is the user. The Gentoo community seemed that way to me in my pre-Ubuntu/Debian days.

Art may be in the eye of the beholder, but the UI isn’t art. UI design adheres to rules, just like everything else. It’s functional. Humans perform roles and tasks that are well known. When you attempt to mold the user into a design concept that violates these roles, you fail.

With that being said sometimes it’s worthwhile to step outside the envelope and try something new. But always remember that humans respond to risk-reward behavior. If you are going to force them to do something new or risky, there needs to be a reward equal to the risk otherwise the user wont adapt.

In the case of the latest design changes, the reward was promised after the fact, but not given. Thus, it is a massive design fail. Yes there were opinions provided and these can be ignored because of meritocracy rules. But good UI design needs to be based on fact. And the facts were not there to justify the change. This was pointed out. And hopefully completely understood.

I also do think that usability work should be done by UX people, and desig nwork by design people, developers are not able to design simple UI (as seen in maany apps). However Ubuntu design could improve “community integration”. Sth like Firefox, ie. that showed mockups for 3.7, 4.0 and wanted to here feedback. This would be a little bit better, but still kudos to Ubuntu design team for great work !

Ubuntu is not really a community-driven distro, and IMO, community-driven is a precondition for being a meritocracy.

Meritocracy is a hierarchy based on merit and meassured by peer-review. If you put in place a stronger hierarchy based on a commercial entity, that entity can manage something meritocracy-like, but not really meritocracy since the idiosincracies of a commercial entity will always clash with the meritocratic hierarchy.

I think it is important to value the opinions of people who have proved their worth or have proved their experience. What I see from my perspective is that often Canonical staff opinions are wrongly taken as gospel and the opinions of the community members who have proved their experience are dismissed without much (obvious or public) consideration.

It’s important to realize that just because someone works for Canonical, doesn’t necessarily mean they know more than the next guy who is *just a community member.* That next guy could be a world famous designer in his day job, but just contributes to Ubuntu in his spare time. How would you know?

I’ve heard some mentions of this but has any one actually expressed this above the level of rumors? Any blog/forum/mail posts about this?