[Sigia-l] Designers and Developers

[Listera]

Benjamin Kahn:

> I'm not necessarily disagreeing with your conclusions, but I think you'd
> be surprised at how few open source projects have more than one person
> working on them. 

Well, today, SourceForge.net lists 81,755 hosted projects, so we can be sure
there a lot of one-person affairs. :-) My point was that the gap between
functionality and usability offered by open source projects is pretty
obvious. There are enough multi-person projects around to illustrate the
point that it's design by committee, but not necessarily a committee of
*designers.* Since most open source projects are purely developer-driven,
starting with strong design leadership, as I advocate, is most likely a
nonstarter.

(In case it may be misunderstood, I have nothing against open source. Its
priorities have been generally directed towards segments that are beyond
this discussion. I think oss folk are beginning to understand this with the
gradual move towards the desktop. But the gap here is huge and the
development methodologies will have to be substantially altered for a UCD
focus.)

Ziya
Nullius in Verba