'[kde-promo] Re: [kde-quality] Quality Teams article, first draft'

[prev in list] [next in list] [prev in thread] [next in thread] 

List: kde-promo
Subject: [kde-promo] Re: [kde-quality] Quality Teams article, first draft
From: Tom Chance <lists () tomchance ! org ! uk>
Date: 2004-02-24 12:20:48
Message-ID: 200402241220.48103.lists () tomchance ! org ! uk
[Download RAW message or body]

On Monday 23 Feb 2004 18:30, Carlos Leonhard Woelz wrote:
> While reading the article, a doubt struck me: Is your article an opinion
> piece, or an announcement?

An opinion piece. I've put a clarifying note at the top to that effect.

> In general, I like the article very much. I think that it will be even
> better in in first person, as it would invite people to discuss.

Thank you, I have taken your points on board and elaborated or clarified where 
I thought appropriate. I also had a frustrating 15 minutes with Kivio, KWord 
and the Gimp trying to draw a flowchart that in the end looks quite cheesy... 
but nevermind :-)

When would you like to see this published? It would be good to have it 
coincide roughly with your "launch" on the dot... so if you could let me know 
with at least a couple of days advance warning (time for it to get through 
Newsforge), that would be helpful.

Regards,

Tom

["kde-article.html" (text/html)]

Getting new people involved is always a key aim for any Free Software Project. But \
for projects like KDE, who are in  a sense the face of Free Software for many \
non-technical users, getting widespread involvement from a representative  sample of \
users can be difficult. To address this, and to develop a whole new community within \
the KDE Project, the  Quality Teams Project has been launched, allowing participation \
from programmers and newbies alike. In this article I  will expand upon why this is a \
more radical idea than one might initially think.

N.B. despite coinciding with the launch of the Quality Teams Project, this \
article represents my personal opinion, and is not meant as an announcement from the \
KDE Project itself.

Open, popular participation in Free Software projects is important for four main \
reasons: productive, social, political and spiritual. To begin with the productive \
aspect, as documented by <a \
href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings-cathedral-bazaar">Eric Raymond</a>, more \
people participating in the development of code tends to lead to better code, and on \
a wider note it can be claimed that the more good people you have contributing in \
general, the better the project will be in general. The Quality Team Project provides \
an easier way to become involved in the KDE Project, including developing KDE's \
codebase. Through working in a Quality Team, an individual can get to know a \
particular application well and its developers, and learn key skills such as using \
CVS, using KDE's bugzilla, preparing and applying patches, and potentially more. \
Rather than having to jump straight into writing C++ code, if you're a budding code \
monkey you can move into your desired position in easy steps, and no doubt have a \
much greater chance of contributing well written, appropriate and worthwhile code \
that will get accepted. So the most immediate and obvious advantage of the project is \
that it will, by making the barriers lower, mean more programmers working on KDE.

Moreover, previous to the launch of the Quality Teams Project, the ways to contribute \
to KDE have been through coding, creating artwork, writing documentation and giving \
money. Now, people can easily get involved in all of those as well as providing \
support to users, promoting KDE through press work and journalism, user interface \
work, testing and looking after individual applications in general. Quality Team \
members will work orthogonally to the developers, acting as a kind of gateway between \
developers and the public, and themselves promoting even wider participation in the \
KDE development process. The gateway will also work both ways, bringing more user \
feedback to the KDE Project as well as educating users about the way Free Software \
projects work by exposing them more to bugzilla, encouraging them to do more \
volunteer work, and simply transmitting more understandable information about the \
work going on.

This not only means better KDE applications, but ones more representative of the \
needs and abilities of all KDE users, and more informed users. Currently, as \
with most Free Software projects, the only way to make your voice heard on KDE's \
development is to subscribe to heavy-use mailing lists or to use the simplified yet \
still complex <a href="http://bugs.kde.org">bugzilla</a>, and so in creating a \
gateway that is both more accessible to users and that protects developers from \
deluges of simple and often repetitive requests, Quality Team members can help widen \
the development process beyond even themselves.

<h3>Social</h3>

The second aspect of participation in Free Software projects is social, of obvious \
importance in any community. Free Software distinguishes itself from proprietary \
most of all in its approach to community, which plays an important role not only in \
licensing and outreach but also in development. A fundamental mistake that has become \
endemic in society is to distinguish and divide time between work and leisure, \
between time spent socialising and time spent working, and this is perhaps felt most \
strongly in the cubicles and hierarchical "vertical" management structures of large \
proprietary software companies. In the Free Software world, in contract, work and \
play, coding and talking, can all take place at any time, sustaining and \
complementing one another. Some of the highest figures in the KDE project talk with \
first time posters on mailing lists, and anyone who frequents developers' haunts \
around the Internet will be familiar with the very social nature of projects.

Given that projects, including KDE, are already very social beasts, where, you might \
ask, does the Quality Team Project come in? The answer is multifarious; most \
importantly, it provides a structure that will facilitate and direct discussions in \
a way that is more conducive to the discussions themselves, and to things actually \
being achieved based on those discussions. For example, rather than idly pondering \
the UI of an application on the developers' mailing list, and occasionally reading \
users' thoughts on sites like <a href="http://dot.kde.org">the dot</a>, developers \
and the public will be able to feed thoughts into the Quality Team, who will handle \
and direct the discussion, and ensure that the outcome is a series of \
reccommendations, or a conclusive end to the discussion. The orthogonal nature of the \
framework makes the impact of this clearer:

<p>
<img src="orthogonal-framework.png" alt="diagram illustrating the orthogonal \
framework">

The flowchart may look like your standard promotional nonsense, but it does \
illustrate that Quality Teams will discuss issues with users that cross over with \
discussions developers are having, and will then relay these discussions on to \
developers. Likewise they will discuss issues with developers and relay these onto \
users. In doing so they would not only organise developers and users into more \
meaningful and useful discussions, but they will also teach users how to do so, and \
avoid splitting the project into two channels of discussion, developers and users, \
with little interaction.

Another facet of the social benefits of the Quality Team Project is the \
democratisation of the social side of the KDE Project. As I have already hinted at, \
not everyone can participate in discussions about KDE, nor in discussions that KDE \
developers have on other subjects (an important aspect of the social side of Free \
Software communities is that discussions aren't forceably limited to work). But by \
setting up Quality Teams, KDE is opening the door for many more people to join up \
and take part in discussions without needing in-depth knowledge of coding, and those \
teams can then relay these discussions onto other users so that the project as a \
whole becomes more transparent. Transparency and openness is about more than simply \
making it possible for people to look inside, it is also about working to remove the \
barriers that stop people from being able to do this. In more conrete terms, Quality \
Teams will help users take vague ideas, analyse them meaningfully, and submit \
coherent suggestions backed by hard data, all the while communicating to the \
community what is happening.

<h3>Political</h3>

Thirdly, Free Software Projects, as community efforts, are inherently political. \
Arrangements have to made as to how decisions are made, how work is distributed, and \
how the project is to be managed generally. Currently KDE has a very Athenian style \
of democracy, in which the person who does the work (i.e. code) makes the decision, \
e.g. if I argue about an implementation of Javascript rendering with other \
developers, and then go away and code something that works, I win the argument by \
default. This approach, common amongst Free Software projects, works well in general, \
but is already running into problems, in particular on the usability lists where it \
is not so obvious as making something work, but deciding how something should \
work. KDE is very much a <a \
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meritocracy">meritocracy</a>.

Nowhere is this felt more keenly than in the current <a \
href="http://www.kde.org/areas/usability/">KDE Usability Project</a>, which is soon \
to change, but that for the moment revolves around a <a \
href="http://lists.kde.org/?l=kde-usability&r=1&w=2">very noisy mailing list</a>. The \
nature of usability decisions is such that the best implementation isn't simply a \
matter of a working one, and so although many people submit a great number of designs \
and suggestions, from a mock up in The GIMP to a working UI file, it is difficult to \
decide upon what works and what doesn't. The mantra of "who codes wins" still seems \
to hold, since it is generally the word of the developers that is final, but \
nonetheless there seems a tension between participants.

In step the Quality Teams, who will mediate discussion between developers, themselves \
and the public. They won't represent any kind of authority, but they will help to \
focus discussions and hopefully make them more accessible to newcomers. There is a \
lot of potential for people to feel ignored in relying on developers to follow all \
discussions about their applications, and so the principle of openness is prone to \
becoming undermined by time constraints.

On a more theoretical level, Quality Teams will empower users. According to Stephen \
Lukes (in Power: A Radical View, 1974), we can exercise three kinds of power \
in any political system: the power to directly implement change, the power to affect \
the agenda, and the power to affect the frameworks by which the agenda is decided and \
implemented. At present, and in any vaguely anarchistic meritocracy, developers \
exercise the first level of power, and the second and third levels are acquired on a \
rather ad hoc basis by the most respected developers. Now this may work well if code \
in itself is all that matters, but the Quality Team Project opens a new possibility, \
i.e. that everyone else can matter. By giving users a gateway to developers, Quality \
Teams provide to an extent the first two levels of power to all users who wish to \
take them, rather like a representative (e.g. MP, Congressman, etc.) and so without \
denying the role of merit in the decision making process, the Quality Teams Project \
has the potential to introduce a formal democratic element that to date has existed \
informally insofar as developers take time out from coding to read community forums. \
Of course in discussing an idea you have no guarantee that a developer will implement \
it, and quite rightly so since it requires somebody to devote some freetime and \
energy, but it will at least formalise the process and improve the chances of vague \
ideas turning into codde.

<h3>Spiritual</h3>

Finally, an aspect of Free Software communities and participants that is often \
overlooked or ignored: the spiritual. The fact that if hackers didn't enjoy coding, \
they wouldn't do it, suggests that there is at least a very basic personal dimension \
to free software, one that enriches a person. The use of the term 'spiritual' may \
seem at odds with many hackers' scientific atheistic outlook, but it simply describes \
those aspects of oneself that cannot be summed up in productive, social or political \
terms. So why are Quality Teams spiritually interesting?

To conclude a theme that has run through this article, Quality Teams provide new work \
that is accessible and attractive to a new group of people who may have been \
previously excluded from the productive side of the community, and so they open up \
the potential for spiritual fulfilment in this new group of people. Working on a Free \
Software project can feel frustrating, tiring and even at times like hard work, but \
it is all the same an enriching experience, exposing you to new practices and people \
and making you learn and develop aspects of your personality and skillbase.

If you're somebody who has used KDE, and who has always wanted to contribute \
productively, rather than participate in solely social discussions, then the Quality \
Teams program could be for you. Whether you want to become a developer, facilitate \
discussions between developers and the public, write documentation, develop a career \
in the media or as a journalist, or simply do odd jobs as they are required, there is \
now something for you in the KDE Project, and it's easy to grasp. To learn more about \
the Quality Teams Project, visit the <a \
href="http://www.kde.org/areas/quality/develop/howto">web site</a> and get involved.

["orthogonal-framework.png" (image/png)]

_______________________________________________
This message is from the kde-promo mailing list.

Visit https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-promo to unsubscribe, set digest on \
or temporarily stop your subscription.

[prev in list] [next in list] [prev in thread] [next in thread] 