[ubuntu-art] Nucleus Meeting Confirmed

[Thorsten Wilms]

A somewhat liberal summary of the meeting:

Attendees:
* John Baer
* K. Vishnoo Charan Reddy
* Ivanka Majik
* Thorsten Wilms
* Kenneth Wimer

As a community team, we do not work for Canonical, but will try to work
with or rather alongside the Design Team.

Ivanka will be our point of contact for the Canonical Design Team (but
we shall only fill her inbox after taking some deep breaths! ;).

Regarding gaining influence on official artwork or being seen as partner
of the Canonical Design Team, we think that quality should precede
demand for equality. That means, if we want to be taken serious, we have
to deliver!

Kenneth Wimer doesn't work for Canonical anymore. He is still the leader
of the Artwork Team, at least as far as Launchpad is concerned. He see's
his future role here in helping with coordination, helping people with
specific questions and mentoring.

Kenneth stated that every time the team had attempted a larger project
on itself and tried to take direction from canonical it had failed,
mainly due to lack of explanation about decisions as well as lack of
involvement in the decision making process. That's why he thinks we need
to stick to the things we are good at, like the photo contest and other
smaller things until we have the resources and structure to accomplish
larger tasks

We all agreed on a need for mentoring and guidance to help people to
gain the experience and skills required to tackle artwork/design tasks.
Kenneth stated that the Oxygen project started with just two artists,
but by finding community members interested in learning they expanded
the group by teaching them.

The artwork team should be running in such a way that the whole
community can make better use of it. Ivanka said that it seems to her
that specific things identified by Canonical should be triaged and
picked up in the same way as a request from a loco team. There should be
more of a presence of our efforts so that we could attract more people
and 'service' more projects (like apps) or create marketing materials
for loco teams and things like that.

Ivanka thinks it would be great if there was a leader who could match
requests to  people, amongst other things.

We agreed that in cases like the Ubuntu Screenshots task, where the
requirements and stakeholders are unclear, no team member should have to
play detective. Instead, the task/specification is considered frozen,
until the required information gets delivered.

Regarding gaining insight into the workings of the Canonical Design
Team, it has been stated that as much as possible is already being put
out via the design.canonical.com blog and further information can be
found in Launchpad reports. Reporting on everything would take too much
time and there simply isn't the bandwidth to communicate what goes on in
a team of full time employees. Their scope is actually a bit larger than
Ubuntu and there may be business interests involved. We are assured that
some of the work is just boring ;)

For cases like LibreOffice, we think that invitations are fine on our
list, but that it's up to any individual to follow or not.
Specifications for such tasks should happen inside the upstream
projects. We can have a section on our Specs page for listing projects
where we "endorse" getting involved.


-- 
Thorsten Wilms

thorwil's design for free software:
http://thorwil.wordpress.com/