[HacktionLab] ogg camp -

[Zoe Young]

hear hear mick,
apologies for slight morning frustration release
and wahey for the continuing of doing whatever it takes
what end of the country is July gathering likely to be?
xxZ

On 21/06/2011 11:16, m3shrom wrote:
> On 21/06/2011 10:43, clara wrote:
>> Hi Zoe,
>>
>> I don't
>>> understand why more of the effort [...] doesn't go into recruiting UI people and persuading
>>> THEM of the value they could add by creating usability in OS tools
>> So why don't YOU go and recruit those people to do the work for
>> something that YOU want to have?
>>
>> Instead of demanding that other people do it for you?
>>
>> Instead of slagging of an event that you didn't go to and the people
>> that did things there?
> I think that it's natural sometimes to feel this kind of frustration -
> but Zoe, I'm disappointed that you feel the need to express your
> frustrations in this way in such a public forum. I don't find it very
> supportive.
>
> However, to share more info, Zoe *has* done a lot of work in this area,
> so it's not like the frustrations have no basis.  We co-organised this
> gathering about Drupal aggregation a while ago.. Please watch this video...
>
> http://www.engagemedia.org/Members/mickfuzz/videos/drupalting.Copy.01.dv.ff.mp4/view
>
> The issues that Zoe talks about in an earlier email are issues that I've
> noticed too. There's a bit in the video where there is a divide between
> the UI people, who are cast as the 'complainers', and the tech heroes
> who build the interfaces.
>
> I don't think it needs to be like this but there is a real danger of
> this divide happening pretty quickly.
>
> One of the real issues is cash money and community. Drupal moves pretty
> slowly. A lot of the UI issues that were addressed back then have now
> disappeared as the Drupal code has moved on. However this was done by a
> lot of people slowly by chipping away at it. It wasn't solved by one
> volunteer techie doing all the work for one project, community code
> doesn't seem to work like that.
>
> My impression of UI development is that it takes a lot of time and
> really good team work and mutual understanding. This seems to be
> something that can be solved by throwing a lot of money and skills and
> free pizza and free android phones etc etc that you get when you are
> developping a web 2.0 site. Everyone gets paid and there's a couple of
> project managers with super good people skills to pull it all together.
>
> But let's face it we don't work in that kind of culture and we don't
> have those resources. We are volunteering our time for free and when it
> comes down to it we put in what we are prepared to put in. I imagine
> that it is really easy to be a tech volunteer, put in lots of work, and
> then get lots of feedback saying that it's 'not usable'. It would be
> really easy to see that as complaining if there wasnt' good
> understanding between the teams.
>
> I think that the Drupal hack day we had was a good move towards sharing
> some of the skills needed to really work on the UI of an aggregator
> website like Be the Media - however it took nearly all day to work
> through getting local installs working and an overview of how it worked.
>
> I would love it if the Be The Media was a project where we could share
> skills and support each other to be able to improve the usability in a
> flexible way, and in a supportive way with good communication and
> understanding.
>
> I think that this is something that we can build on, and I would invite
> those interested in keeping working on the Be the media site to email me
> and I can invite you to a summer gathering coming up on the 9th/10th July.
>
> nice one
> mick
>
>
>
>
>
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