23
Jul
Hi, here's Datschge.
I guess I should introduce myself first, but there's really not much to say. I'm a big fan of Motoi Sakuraba and am crying me myself a river for not being able to visit his live concert last Saturday. -_- I'm putting my oar in into KDE for about one year now. Being an ultimately useless non-programmer I've been digging for parts where I can easily teak ("improve") stuff while hoping to reach my goal, making it easier for "outsiders" to effectively contribute to KDE. I started being vocal during the discussions which led to the kde.org redesign, added noise to the usability list, then decided to pick bugs.kde.org, something noone else seems to like to tackle, tweaked stuff here and there, added an hopefully easy to grasp supporting KDE page which I hope will be translated and localizated into other languages/localizations soon. Right now I'm "working" on (I'd rather call it 'keeping myself distracting from') writing a decent help page for bugs.kde.org and putting together a pseudo "KDE HIG" informing people (myself!) about all the build in consistency features KDE offer for ages already. Right now I'm totally excited since I got a hack of weekly-bug-summary for showing the amount of old reports and the ratio of old and all reports per product to work in my local bugzilla installation. Thanks to Steve for the inspiration. ^_^
Hm, I think I wrote a little too much here...
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Not to burst your nice bubble, but...
...there's no way we can force people to spend more time than they are already spending. Many developers are already unable to follow all the discussions on KDE lists, needless to say that outside sites like kde-look, kde-forum and all the local KDE sites out there can only get even less of a share of important attention. In the end much of the impression that some might feel excluded boils down to a lack of time of those who could help out. The only way I see changing that is encouraging people to inform themselves what possible effective ways there are to contribute, and make use of them without needing to rely on others. That's all we can do (it's much, just do it =).
Now about the changes you suggested:
- I don't know the GNOME bug tool (and am not at all impressed by their Bugzilla web frontend). Reporting bugs is already the most direct and sane way to inform KDE developers of certain problems and suggestions, it's easy to start a report through "Help" > "Report bug..." in any KDE app. Also the KDE crash manager in CVS Head used to have a link to bugs.kde.org afaik. If the wording of all those is your only problem let me know.
- As I wrote above the most direct and sane way to inform KDE developers of certain problems and suggestions is using the existing bug tracking infrastructure. Everything else will just either take up more time for those involved or get more easily lost in obscurity than it's really worth the hassle imo.
- Kde-forum is only one of many many places and ways to talk about anything related (or not) to KDE, hardly anyone is able to keep track of all the multinational forums, mailing lists, IRC channels etc. Also it's important to note that there's no general representative having the power to force KDE his way, so such persons won't show up in selective parts of the community either.
The only way to improve communication different parts of KDE's community afaics is sticking to the few real central meeting points as a common platform for suggestions and reports about problems for everyone. bugs.kde.org, being KDE's sole bug tracker, is one such place, so make use of it as individuals or as community. Another way to increase the attention to eg. kde-forum's output on suggestions and problem reports is letting someone regularly summarize them and send it to KDE Dot News or KDE Traffic. Or look at supporting KDE once again.
Summary
(Look, this blog entry already got moved to page 2 of the blogs page. Are people actually reading that far? ;) )
This is my suggested ToDo regarding your suggestions:
I'll look at improving the online wizard.
Kde-look is an outside (as in 'not residing in KDE's CVS, which is the only official place for official KDE stuff') site so it's up to those commiting the artwork etc. to kde-look to also commit it to KDE's CVS if they wish to do so. There are several artwork related mailing lists where I'd assume one can ask respective questions to members who have access to CVS.
HIG
Cool, it would be great to see a HIG actually based on science for once. Have you started to look at the current HCI research out there yet? Zack and I had talked a while ago about setting up a research project at PSU here in the US where we can test out some ideas and get some more realistic numbers of how things are working and how people are using our apps. One things OSS really gets short sticked on is we dont get the fuzzy warn usability research companies get. We just have to live with "experts" who make things they think are cool....
oh well good luck
Clarification
There's not much really usability related about the document except that I intend it to showcase the existing KDE framework, especially features like Kiosk or stuff like KDialog::spacingHint and KDialog::marginHint you yourself added, which should be considered and extended on when looking for possible usability improvements. So far it's imo a pity that there's much HCI discussion (science based or not) on the usability list without knowledge of the framework in use. Thanks to Henrique Pinto who's managing a school's setup using Kiosk and has rather instant usability feedback this is changing.
As for doing HCI researches I still have good contacts to several teachers responsible for computer stuff at my former high school which I intend to make use of after the current summer break, but that's a completely different topic.