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Top-level
 You mention maintainers, that's a curious word to use. Because it speaks of static and unchanging babysitting rather than positive and ambitious creation. In Inkscape our ux design model is to make ux and design skills have the same respect as labor as any programmer. To give developers a way to ask for help and spaced for a ux team to exist and find itself outside of the shadow of code creation. Adam Belis has done impressive things. Though I admit mostly with patience. 17 comments
 @doctormo @scottjenson Inkscapes ux model asks to make friends with a dev first. Patience and respect for work won't do. Onboarding is hard as there is no coordination, or a team. Makes team play really hard. Yes, building relationships is the best way to operate when there's no money. Honestly if there's more investment going forwards, and I hope there is, it'll be easier for the ux team to create entire projects and get them funded rather than having to depend on relationships to carry the labour exchange. @doctormo @scottjenson Of course money makes everything easier. Like any project engagement ux comes with costs and benefits. Treating ux as a too expensive afterthought just keeps away contributions entirely – a pretty high price to pay as well. Building a community is hard. Very. It's not too expensive compared to anything else. Everything is too expensive when you have nothing. Programming, documentation, posting screenshots to the website, triaging bugs. It's all very fragile because every one of them depends on someone volunteering their time and trying to work with other people who must also be convinced to volunteer their time. (hence relationships) Culturally we ask developrs to consult with the ux team often. It's not an afterthought.  @doctormo We've had this conversation before, about the lack of money making things hard. I agree. But I'm asking for things that shouldn't cost more money: coordination, teamwork, and planning. Are these hard and take more time? Absolutely! I'm not saying they are easy. But they are required for UX to be effective. I don't see money as the gating concern. Just to be clear, I'm making a point here about #FOSS as a general community, I'm not making any specific comment about Inkscape. I know We can make better culture. But I also think you underestimate how much a factor resources play in coordination. Not just money, it could be relationships. I.e. A community that forcefully coordinates, it just forcefully coercive and exploiting labour. And I don't think you intend to have labour problems. But that's where you end up.  @doctormo @scottjenson I also think coordination is a different story of skills from coding, uxd, uxr, etc. I know for me that my coordination skills get burned up in my day job and I don't have a lot of headspace to do that outside of work, but nor do I wish to be managed, so for my stuff I just give it to the universe to do what they like @doctormo Are you implying that coordination is exploitative? I assume you coordinate on Inkscape? If so, how do you do it so it's not? It can be. Coordinated consent is nonlinear, ask a group of 10 people where they want to go for lunch. @doctormo I'm trying to follow your argument. I doubt you are saying you CAN'T coordinate. Right? I assume you have to on Inkscape. If so, how do you do it so it works? Patience, generosity, friendship, reciprocity, and spaces to hold the community. I.e. not just got issues trackers or mailing lists. And still working it out tbh. @doctormo Agree strongly. It's hard work and there is always more to do. I think we're saying much the same thing. My point is just that there is a "cultural advantage" to programming tasks (for lack of a better term) that allows them to be coordinated a bit easier. UX tasks are a bit more outside the standard flow and just need a bit more help. Just exploring what this means. The "Make a small PR" is an ineffective model for UX work. It can work for trivial changes, but not bigger ones. Yes. It's a round hole square peg. And we both, I think, understand why well meaning people recommend tools for work they don't understand is bad. We might be able to come up with tools for designers. It would be interesting to see as many penpot instances as wiki's available for drafting for example. @doctormo @scottjenson This is less about tooling but more about how the team dynamic is coordinated. Code contributions just have a much "easier onboarding", which in turn means the focus is on them. If we agree that all contributions are valuable we should put in a bigger effort to make ux effort being relevant as well. I can see how that requires heavy lifting on the dev organization side, but the alternative means largely excluding ux. |
Gregory's Server
@doctormo I'm happy to use a different word, it's just the one I've heard most often. That's great news about UX roles at Inkscape! I didn't know that. So much of ANY productive accomplishment seems to be based with 'having a lot of patience'.