Co-creation leading to co-development?

skunkworks

asked 2013-12-24 22:40:20 +0300

8994 ●62 ●67 ●71

updated 2013-12-24 22:42:21 +0300

An obvious step up from how we are doing co-creation here on Together is to take an idea and factually co-develop, co-design, co-debug it, etc. There's a few challenges regarding that.

SailfishOS is currently built from:

Mer Core (open source, openly developed), http://www.merproject.org
Nemo Middleware (open source, openly developed)
Sailfish UI (closed source currently, not openly developed)
A hardware adaptation (typically closed source, full of 3rd party bits and pieces)

I believe personally that unless you can factually be open about plans, directions, during the development of open source SW, there's really not much worth in open sourcing it. Plus - a mobile stack is -big-

In addition to that, there is a challenge with UI and applications - especially a modern mobile UI:

Is going to be heavily designer driven - as in, there may very well be a requirement to have an accepted design before your feature is merged
It needs to be fluid, 60fps and you need to take care of your feature and be responsible for it
It needs to have test cases and integrate well into a complex system

And that really complicates typical open source development methods.

I think that if we (as in Jolla) as a small company, work from the perspective that we start with co-creation of ideas, then work with contributors in these ideas and bug reports to focus where the real openness effort needs to happen, it'll help a lot.

What do you think? How can we do realistic co-development? Answers such as 'open source everything' is not what I'm looking for. It's easy to ask for openness, but it's hard to do in practice.

Here's one for thought:

co-develop first on the most common pain points of a mobile UI - e-mail, calendar, browser comes to mind. Help nuture ideas into features and get them implemented.

Hi, I'm Carsten Munk, Chief Research Engineer at Jolla. Let's try to grow the skunkworks of Jolla and SailfishOS together. Use the tag 'skunkworks' for your ideas and thoughts. Rule #1 of skunkworks: stick to something that is not short term (rest of site is good for that), but is possible 6 months from now or beyond that. I believe that the best research department a mobile OS can have is a worldwide community of passionate contributors and users. Let's prove this theory right.

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I'm not a developer, but in my humble opinion this is probably the most important topic here.
Hope for (even) more openness from Jolla than Nokia was the single biggest reason for me to support jolla. So far I am pleased, and I hope I will have the same reason to buy the next phone too.

Nilux ( 2014-01-29 10:34:22 +0300 )edit

@Stskeeps: Hi, I have a suggestion for enabling more co-development, rather than just co-creation. I made it a Question here: https://together.jolla.com/question/38722/make-sailfish-oss-front-end-ui-open-source-but-not-the-ui-back-end/ I am happy to make it an Answer under this question if you think it belongs here more than where it is now. I would be very happy for any comment.

00prometheus ( 2014-04-14 05:25:52 +0300 )edit

Umm, “fluid UI” ... how is closing off the source helping with that? And if it does, are we going to get a fluid UI eventually? Because sailfish so far has been, sadly, everything but fluid.

mornfall ( 2014-12-02 17:30:14 +0300 )edit

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answered 2013-12-25 22:07:29 +0300

arjwright
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http://antoinerjwright.co...

I need to read this again, but I've got something that's in my head now:

should a UI be openly designed and if so, what's its vision that holds it together
Should a UI be designed to design itself over time (if you will, build the components openly which adapt themselves to various user needs

In reading this, that's what came to mind. I think that the process doesn't matter as much as the vision does. What does SailfishOS want for itself? Is what it wants open-design, or open processes to improve it?

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I want you to clarify what you mean by openly designed. Because openly designed (IMO) leads to design by comitee, and this leads to poorly designed stuff. I appreciate Jolla providing the design, guidelines and reviews, and would prefer contributions to be only technical at first.

Sfiet_Konstantin ( 2013-12-26 17:38:15 +0300 )edit

I totally agree with @Sfiet_Konstantin comment above. That's why I was more talking about Nemo in my post, because I see room for improvement there (middleware - technical stuff).

fk_lx ( 2013-12-26 22:54:51 +0300 )edit

@Sfiet_Konstantin that's exactly what I mean. Understanding what we are assuming towards with the platform puts the process and purposes of components in their right place. Right now, or at least how this question is made I don't know that Jolla has done that to the extent that question asks.

arjwright ( 2013-12-27 00:48:37 +0300 )edit

answered 2014-12-07 20:17:36 +0300

simo

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http://reviewjolla.blogsp...

updated 2014-12-07 20:22:58 +0300

Feels kind of odd to add a 12th answer to this great thread... But when there's an issue, you try to find the correct place to post it.

Recently, a new member joined TJC. He seems like a fan of BB type of user interface, and after a week of using Jolla he posted about his wishes for changes in Jolla's UI. By that time, he had gathered some 300 karma points with few posts, and he followed the existing help+faq+guidelines in his new post.

After this rather opposite opinion and maybe a couple of bad (but not that bad) comments and unaccepting the most voted answer, he got bombed down to 1 point and got a few bad (but not that bad) feedbacks as well, mostly for these reasons:

He's opinion didn't seem to fit into the core elements of Jolla's UI
He had a list of questions as a question, and he wanted to keep this question open, as he saw it as important for his user case (it was also posted by the guidance existing)
He sounded like he wants to use another phone (For me it seems he just wanted to change the UI in Jolla in a way better suiting his user case)

Now I'd like to bring our voting behavior towards a new member into this table. He might have valuable posts before,and possibly later too contributing to the community. If he'd been around for a couple of months, I might have downvoted a couple of his questions as well, but after we see that the message is clearly delivered (many disagreeing already), why add another downvote? IMO it just drives people away, instead of making them feel welcome to our forum. Thanking for even totally opposite opinions, guiding to how TJC is supposed to be used might be a better way to go. Let's adopt, adapt and improve on this! And yes, you're welcome to disagree ;)

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I understand what you are saying, and I agree that we should welcome all input and discuss our different points of view openly. Diversity enriches the community and strengthens the project as a whole. The way I understand the voting system is quite simple. If I disagree about an issue I downvote, if I agree I upvote, if I'm not sure or do not care I do not vote and let the other users discuss the issue more throughly. I, however, do not check who posted something, nor how much karma he/she has before I vote, because all that I'm interested in is the issue at hand. If we start pondering about the political correctness of up voting or downvoting we would be harming the democratic process itself. By not downvoting things you don't agree with, or by upvoting things you don't agree with, you are skewing the results and thus harming the system as a whole. I don't think anyone should take their downvotes personally, nor worry too much about karma. The important thing is that we keep discussions open, civil and always focused on the issues at hand, so that we as a community can contribute to to make the Jolla project more successful. Sail on!

shfit ( 2014-12-08 02:26:45 +0300 )edit

You have great points there about the effect to the system. Maybe some kind of a "point shield" for new members for few week would be another option, downvotes still having effect to the question/answer itself. I must admit I'm especially careful in downvoting any post by anyone with only some karma points, even if I wanted to. I usually leave a comment instead.

simo ( 2014-12-08 02:37:44 +0300 )edit

Or maybe we could just put a limit to the amount of karma you can loose with a single question. That way we do not completely disencourage users from bringing up unpopular issues.

shfit ( 2014-12-08 03:10:40 +0300 )edit

Btw, maybe it would also be a good idea to give users karma points for extending or updating wikis and for posting comments and the upvotes their comments receive. If the point of karma is to encourage participation, then all kinds of participation should be rewarded.

shfit ( 2014-12-08 03:17:08 +0300 )edit

I agree with @shfit.

nthn ( 2014-12-08 12:13:32 +0300 )edit

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