My theory is (and I’m hoping to learn from your experience with Drupal) that because people in this community have all kinds of ideas, opinions, and even solutions in their heads already, an entirely open feedback process would be very useful for you BEFORE or in preparation for designing a solution – really, to scope out the project (identifying the problems).

Once you have scoped out the project and you know what will be tackled (whether that’s really specific, like features or a general sort boundaries of the design problem), I think it’s in specific request for feedback on specific things that may generate the most value, given your enormous community.

That’s why I was asking on Twitter if you were planning on showing interim deliverables and allowing informal feedback. The example of Wired’s editorial process blog really got me thinking about that http://blog.wired.com/storyboard. Seems very powerful. One a side note, I’d be very curious to how a commnunity would react to other inputs you are using (for example, if you do a landscape/competitive analysis to start the project and share that, people could poke holes, add to it, debate it, etc). I suspect the openess of the process would enrich even your ‘standard’ tools.

Finally, if you are going to let the feedback floodgates open and provide multiple channels for feedback, it will be really high energy. And as brilliant as it is to have so much feedback you don’t know what to do with it, it can be very draining on you as a designer if you set the expectation of action or response to feedback.

I mentioned this on twiter but now that I read your post the metaphor of putting things out to dry as part of the washing machine cycle totally fits ;)

Please don’t feed the memes. I guess by Intellectual Property you mean copyright? Open Source projects care very much for copyright. Drupal’s licence, the GPL, is based on it.

@Dan Brown – I think it’s definitely about facilitation. Within this project, we are all seeing the official ‘redesign project’ as really just being the creation of a framework from which the Drupal community can make good decisions going forwards. It’s much more about learning to fish than presenting a lovely looking fish at the end of the design phase. Setting up these channels for communication and working out how to feed them into the process is probably a key part of that.

I recently wrote about the need for an increased focus on design in the world of open source software. I am thrilled to see that groups like Drupal are starting to recognize the need for UX. By sharing your ideas publicly, I can only hope that the rest of the Drupal developer community begins to see UX’s value.
http://www.adaptivepath.com/blog/2008/08/04/open-source-design/

We already have a model for managing that community complexity… the designer is the core comitter of ideas. Some patches make it, some don’t.

The expectation would be that ideas that make it through the designers (you all) get into the design.

What role does the designer have in this scenario? Dictator? All your design decisions belong to me, but thanks for the good ideas. Or is it mediator, where the designer facilitates the conversation and directs it to some unified decision-making? (Questions not necessarily rhetorical… :-)

Either way, you’re laying some fascinating groundwork. As the science of software development evolves, so, too must our approaches to design.

Can’t wait to see the result!

I did a presentation a month or so ago talking about this subject and how it differed between the IA/UX community and the Account Planning field. I actually feel that the UX community does this better then some other communities. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t go further. We still have a long way to go.