The idea, in brief, is that you need a police sargeant to lay down the rules that make sense from his vantage point (e.g. Mark / Leisa / Acquia) and beat cops to apply them with more or less rigor as the situation requires.

Open source emphasizes the sargeant’s commitment to listen to the beat cops and change what the rules are (and how many rules there should be). An organization of all beat cops would be anarchy (in the perjorative sense of the term); an organization of sargeants would be IBM.

It’s a GREAT read. I hereby evangelize. Bateson was a student of systems science, cybernetics and biology.

-Bram

I was a bit shocked by webchick’s comment above; “showing some respect for the people who actually built the free stuff you’re using to make money with your clients would be greatly appreciated.”

I have at no point felt or thought that Mark or Leisa or the D7UX process or project was disrespectful of this fact. Perhaps Angie (webchick) did not mean to imply that you had been. I hope so, since if not, then this issue needs a lot more discussion yet.

Er. No. :) Just to clarify (emphasis mine):

I do feel though that some of the comments here are not fully grasping the situation about why it’s so critical for the process to be open and inclusive to the community, and worse, are trying to paint the Drupal community as ungrateful snobs or similar. So I’ll try and provide some background a little here.

Mark and Leisa have been nothing but awesome and respectful throughout this process; just giving a reality check to some folks not as immersed in the community.

The core part of the OpenOffice.org UX team is located at Sun’s office in Hamburg, Germany. However, we are from time to time present at conferences such as the OpenOffice.org Conference 2009 in Italy or CHI. Next will be the UX Intensive week in Berlin, conducted by Adaptive Path. Check out our website ux.openoffice.org and the current project to redesign the UI of OOo at http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Renaissance.

I’d be glad to hear more from you guys! Is there any communication method you prefer? By the way, a lot of our wensite is based on Drupal. Hence, we might have a lot of feedback for you :-)

Andreas

I was a bit shocked by webchick’s comment above; “showing some respect for the people who actually built the free stuff you’re using to make money with your clients would be greatly appreciated.”

I have at no point felt or thought that Mark or Leisa or the D7UX process or project was disrespectful of this fact. Perhaps Angie (webchick) did not mean to imply that you had been. I hope so, since if not, then this issue needs a lot more discussion yet.

My own opinions echo what many of the early responders said.

I think you guys are doing an excellent job, and I’m really enjoying the “show” and totally support the approach you are taking. Your openness and involvement with the Drupal developer community is critical, and you are doing an excellent job.

You continue to surprise and fascinate me with every new video, article and diagram, and most importantly with your process and Drupal community involvement. As others said, you are a truly great asset to the Drupal community! :)

Well done! :)

I’ve been thinking about what you’ve mentioned here, also about moving from abstract to concrete, and modularising the project etc. and we did a bunch of work today and came up with a Project Framework. I think/hope it might make all the difference in our communication on this project. We’ll see!

I hope we can network somehow and exchange more of our experience, our knowledge and ideas on how to improve UX engineering within open source communities.

Best regards,
Andreas

I think this amount of listening and exploring you are doing is great and inevitably feels a little messy, chaotic and abstract because there is a lot to get a handle on and so many different voices and different kinds of users and uses of Drupal.

With the drupal.org design I think I had a somewhat clear sense of how the product was evolving through iterations. You are not even to the first iteration with Drupal 7 so…yeah, it’s harder to follow and “visualize” conversations about principles and goals than it is to follow a series of sketches. I have a sense that you are thinking to work towards having a more usable admin panel or series of context-sensitive panels, and are trying to figure out where the user will want to land after changing admin settings (or doing anything else), making everything more intuitive. it would be great, I suppose, to be able to go to the D7UX web site and see the various suggestions neatly organized and listed, but I imagine there are too many variations, and many of them are not so easy to reduce to bullet points or what have you.

It’s a difficult job! The first time I read you, first time I saw you two on video, first time I met you, I could see immediately that you were very intelligent, passionate about tackling this projects, had great communication skills, and brought a lot of creativity to the job. So, I trust you. I think we are in great hands. And at the end of the day your ideas will be vetted by the meritocracy (along with anyone else’s ideas that are put forward). So I have no worries. Just do your best (and I know you do) and don’t worry about the rest.

I just wish I could follow more of your design projects like this to better learn from you! You are the best.

Some thoughts re your thoughts: (came to mind while reading yr post)

related to an earlier post (why is D7UX and this site on WP) is the idea of conceptual or mental model for (the representation of & interface to) these discussions you are having:

I think your use of video and paper prototyping is frackin’ awesome, but I think there might be something to look at wrt persistence of discussion. Because you are spending so much time on project comms (and negotiation of meaning etc) topics drop below the fold and off the front page very quickly… This can be disconcerting and feel like the conversation is more one-way than a large part of your audience may be used to. Possibly another supporting reason for the Mark and Leisa show perception.?

@webchick actually made me think of this with the comment about sticky posts etc.. I think your UX Principles banner at D7UX is a great approach to this kind of thing… but it also seems that you need to keep surfacing the important stuff manually, inline: the links to your larger artifacts in this post, for instance. That just gets lost.

So, if you are losing track of these elements, your audience will definitely have trouble keeping them top of mind.

I’m led to wonder how you might have these elements organised on your laptop, or in your brain, as opposed to these sites..?

I hope this helps.. :-)

ps: I do find it weird how much our comms & tech can influence our process of designing comms & tech (ad infinitum), but as Bill Buxton said at chi last year – if you think you can put a paperclip into a work environment and not change it, you’re very mistaken.

just to clarify, the quotes from webchick in this post are not necessarily her own views, but a summary of some of the key points in a lengthy IRC discussion (that I was not a party to). Webchick is certainly no troll! And I certainly don’t get the feeling that she expects us to work exactly as the rest of the Drupal community do – she’s been v supportive of us and we thank her for it, but all of this ‘open design’ stuff has originated from Mark & I and was never really imposed on us by the Drupal community as a required methodology. We just felt it was the only way to work on projects like these and actually see something come of them! (And, perhaps even a chance to demonstrate good design practice to a community who may not have had the opportunity to observe what designers actually do first hand).

thanks again for the support tho’. Much appreciated.