[libreoffice-design] A very serious PLEA

Hi Christoph, Loic, all.


On 11.09.16 07:40, Christoph Noack wrote:
> Hi Lic, hi all!
>
> > When commenting on these proposals, please bear in mind that
> >   a) it's a contest and only one designer will be paid,
> >   b) the deadline of the contest is in 48 hours,
> >   c) the prize is USD$495 (thanks to Free Software Foundation France for funding this work).
> Very cool - I wasn't aware that FSF is so kind to fund this :-)
>
> As an additional note - do we get the "source code" to work on further
> refinements / changes after the challenge is over?

I'm writing this in relation to the use of "99Designs" for a LibreOffice 
Design solution.
This isn't a criticism, this isn't meant to delay or obfuscate any 
future development tasks. It REALLY isn't.
It is, in complete sincerity, a PLEA to all developers (whom I haven't 
CC'ed intentionally, because I know none) and anyone here to NOT endorse 
the use of services like 99Designs.

And this is certainly not meant to offend anyone who takes part in 99 
Designs (like Aleksander, whose work I adore and cannot commend enough).

99Designs and other services like it are known in the Design industry as 
"spec-work" facilitators.
They belittle what we do. This issue has been raised before on this 
mailing list.
The following website is dedicated to eliminating services like 
99Designs; http://www.no-spec.com/
These services propogate low-pay, unreasonable conflict and lower both 
standards of quality and the adoption of conventions of iterative 
Design. They take work away from professionals who demonstrate an 
understanding of the canons of Graphic/Publication/Web/User Interface 
Design and they alienate clients from developing an understanding of the 
way creative process develops and is justified.
But that's not why I'm asking.

In the case below, the FSF gave close to US$500 to fund this.
The $500 dollars was used, spent. One Designer was rewarded. One 
solution was achieved. An entire community of volunteers, circumvented.

I realise you appealed to the list, and no-one responded.
It sounds self-gratifying of me, then, to suggest that you should have 
tried again, and again, and again.
But after a few tries to an unpaid community, you procured funds, you 
outsourced the work, and as far as I can see, no one on this list knew 
about it until it was done. That money should have come to the Design 
team. That sounds rude, I'm sure, but I consider it rude that money that 
could have gone into Design's NON-EXISTENT budget was used to solve ONE 
Design problem amongst the many that exist.

If you had said to this list; "We will give the Design TEAM US$500 if 
any one member comes up with a satisfactory solution to this problem" I 
guarantee you, we together, would work to ensure that the team 
benefitted. The money could have remained in LibO.
We could have used that money to fund THINGS WE NEED;
- Commission a photographer for high-quality LibO-specific RF-stock 
photography that we DESPERATELY need
- Acquire group license to online mock-up tools like Balsamiq
- Pay participants to take part in an online survey to refine our Design 
requirements
- Commission a typographer to create a Libre-Office font
- Pay for Bernhard/Christoph to attend a conference representing us
- Pay for promotional material Designed by this community
The list goes on. Every option above would have funded a long-lasting, 
far-reaching pervasive solution.

But at the end of the day...
Why am I doing this? Why do I volunteer my time for free, and my work 
iteratively, if you're going to PAY people to do what I do when I don't 
do it in time? What is the POINT of an open-source community of 
volunteers if you've found a "cost-effective" way of building "free 
software"?

...Why does Design bother working with Development over a UI reDesign we 
want SO BADLY when we should just raise some funds and pay an overseas 
Dev-company to build a fork of LibO the way we want? Why do we try 
again, and again, and again.

I guess it's respect.
-Nik


The difference between an Open-source Volunteer and a 
competition-participant is ideology, not pay.
*Please support the Design team over external providers, otherwise you 
make our efforts here redundant.

*

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