Over the last few weeks there were a lot of articles and discussions about how to manage a project well. From commercial success to user support nearly every subject was set on proof. However, after I’ve read the comments to the articles my conclusion was very plain: some minds will never change!Though I don’t like this conclusion it expresses nothing but the human nature. However, I thought, at least the everlasting conflict between users and developers could be mediated somehow. If people can’t come across in mind, maybe they can come along in peace, at least.
I found that some form of mediator could save a lot of time and energy on both sides. For the fun of it, I decided to design a logo that expresses the level of communication the visitor can expect from the team behind a project site. This logo, actually a small logo development kit (LDK), I’d like to promote here in this article. I call it the Common Creative(s) LDK v1.0 and release it under the Creative Commons Public Domain License. You can download it as SVG or Inkscape SVGZ. The similarity with the term Creative Commons is intentional. It shall express that licensing a product is only one part of a project. The other part is maintaining it.
Here is how the introduction goes:
A common creative is only one of numerous individuals in this world who like to create something useful in their sparetime and offer it to the public.
The Common Creative(s) LDK provides him with a simple method to express how far his motivation goes when it comes to participation and support.
However, motivation is case-dependent. A Common Creative(s) Logo is neither a license nor any other form of agreement. Respectively, the common creative can
not be made responsible for any misinterpretation resulting from his use of a Common Creative(s) Logo.
If possible, the Common Creative(s) Logo should be installed as a link to a page that is providing an overview about all the available ways of support
and participation. The page should also provide this short introduction to the Common Creative(s) LDK and a link for downloading the SVG document.
Besides the logo name and the date of publication, the Comon Creative(s) Logo expresses three further details through the chosen primitive (vector object):
shape (the group of people invited to contact the common creative):
circle: all who are interested in the project
star: only experienced users
octagon: only active developers
background color (the most flexible way of contact):
green: kind of hotline, like a mailinglist or a chatroom
yellow: only form-based or otherwise indirect
orange: no support (help yourself)
border color and pattern (usual response time):
full grey: 24h/day
dashed grey: ~48h
full black or none: vague / none
For example, the project may have a bug tracker (yellow) but the experienced user (star) who has posted a patch shall not expect feedback (black or none). The three possible logos look as follows (the size is irrelevant):
If necessary, the common creative can overlap multiple primitives to invite different groups appropriately. The following example expresses that unexperienced users are invited to enter requests into a form but shouldn’t expect any response. Experienced users can enter the developer’s 24h online channel:
The official classification of the Common Creative(s) LDK v1.0 is as follows. Requests into the comment box below please!
About the Author:
The author, Dennis Heuer, is a 34-years old german social scientist concentrating on human-computer-interaction (HCI) and e-learning.
If you would like to see your thoughts or experiences with technology published, please consider writing an article for OSNews.
Its not entirely clear wether this is sarcasm or a serious proposal, but even if it isn’t serious, I think it should be.
I have a real problem with self-centered whiners who cry about how OSS developers don’t treat them better then most companies treat paying customers, even though its the developers who are owed for giving away free software.
On the other hand, I would like the option to pass software by if the developers are particularly unresponsive to the users. They have EVERY right not to be mind you, but I may choose different software as a result.
If OSS devs are up front and clear about the level of participation and communication they are willing to put up with, then maybe the whiners can be silenced (i.e. shutup whiner, it was posted on their site, you have no one to blame but yourself) and we can all avoid annoying devs and yet participate apporpriatly on a project by project basis.
Interesting stuff.
This proposal will be very hard to use in practice. As a developer it’s easier to ignore some user request than to take an hour or 2 (which you probably need minimum to make your personal star…) and putting the start on the homepage. Users will probably still bug you, because they are to lazy to look for starts on the homepage or don’t have svg plugins in their browser.
After all my mood as developer might change alot depending on the amount of free time I have. So to keep the stars accurate you would have to change it often, which even produces more work…
I’m not quite sure if I understood the proposal. What about fraud?
What? What kind of fraud?
Aehmm, there will always be fraud. You can’t hinder this. The LDK is not an official logo but something you use because you want to. This is like when you offer your code to the net; it could be a virus…
And, the SVG file includes all necessary parts. You can move together your own logo in about 5 min (no joke). And, you can export it to png, except of trying to integrate the svg code into your page code…
A nice idea I suppose, but I just can’t see someone visiting a page and seeing a green star inside a stripy grey outline and say “Oh that must mean I’m not allowed to join because I’m a n00b, and the experienced guys have to wait 48 hours anyway”.
How is anyone going to understand it? By clicking on it and getting a textual description – in which case why not just have the text description instead?
Sure, it could work once it reached critical mass, but I’ve never seen any sort of online logo that managed that…
Let’s have a look at the example in the text:
The following example expresses that unexperienced users are invited to enter requests into a form but shouldn’t expect any response. Experienced users can enter the developer’s 24h online channel.
Just recently, I had a problem I couldn’t figure out on my own, thus I visited the project’s IRC channel. Assume the project had the above sign: Do you really believe I would have stayed out of the channel althought I’m an unexperienced user?
Btw, what differentiates experienced and unexperienced users?
The other way around, some Open Source projects do indeed compete very much with similar projects. Do you really believe they wouldn’t lie about their “service level”? It might not even be a concious lie but a change in service level without web site update. Happens all the time according to my experience.
However, I admit I still have problems understanding the article. It’s quite late here.
See it so: You can use the logo as eyecatcher and have a small text placed somewhere beside it. This works ok, I think.
And, look at the bottom of this page. Can you say what all the logos stand for? Me not. However, they’re there, aren’t they?
This article is so very very strange. First there is a vague, but bitter kick to (OSS, I assume) projects that are not mentioned by name. If I should guess, I’d say he either was rejected from a development team or he was told to stfu and rtfm on a mailing list.
…and then he comes up with a branding system for projects!? If you encounter a project, you quickly see if there are online docs, a forum or a mailing list. By e.g. browsing the mailing list archives you see questions answered before, and what kind of replies you can expect. If you don’t WANT to read mailing list archives, then I can tell you right now what kind of answers you can expect.
It sounds like he is trying to make projects in general fit into standardized categories he knows from somewhere else. I don’t get it.
Common Creatives as of Sept 25th 2004
Contact: Talk Response: No Project for: Experienced
I seriously don’t understand why it must be made into an icon. You’re almost completely at a lost if you can’t see. Adding alt text for every icon, although a good idea, would get abused anyway because people are simply lazy as far as those things are concerned. I know this makes your time designing in inkscape wasted, so I guess it won’t be taken as advice to get rid of the icon idea all together. Hopefully though you’ll include a text version as a serious alternative. Very few of these kinds of systems are successful and I think geekcode was one of the most successful (not a coincidence that it is all text). I’ll admit geekcode uses text in such a way that it might as well be a graphic diagram it is so obfuscated, which is a reason why it too has had so little success (other than the lazy factor I mentioned above).
That being said, it’s a great idea. This is the best part of open source and free software development: most projects will accept donations of work from anyone. Those that don’t probably shouldn’t be given giant gold stars near their names, but that’s my opinion. Possibly a better image would be a giant circle with a cross through it or skull and crossbones for them. Anyway, anything that adds more understanding to people outside a project on how open the project is being developed is great by me. The more metadata about how [openly] projects are developed and maintained the better. Rant: Imagine if basically every closed source project would immediately get a crossed out circle or skull and crossbones.. oh the controversy.
Once upon a time, I was paid to manage project. Trust me, it was no fairy tale.
If you can stomach project management courses, find some given in resorts near beaches and tell your boss you need to go. If nothing else, you’ll learn some good buzzwords to put on your Powerpoint slides.
But, here’s what they will never tell you in those courses:
1) Be honest with everyone on the project, especially you boss and the customer, and, most importantly, yourself.
2) Insist on honesty in the people you work with and who work for you.
The dumbest stunts any project managers ever pull is to lie to themselves and their boss and thier customer about what’s going on in the project. If you like writing fiction, try a novel. Otherwise, it will come back to bite you.
Play hardball with staffers and bureaucrats who lie to you about their piece of the project. Don’t ruin your career because you let someone else get away with lieing to you.
I don’t know whether or not this icon is a good idea, but I do know that using colour as the *only* indicator of a value is very very bad indeed.
If you have three dimensions to measure, indicate them with three unambiguous representations. Colour is not good enough – think of colour-blind people, and low-colour-depth displays. Text displays get an ALT tag, hopefully.
You’re got “who”, “how” and “when”. I’d break these down to :-
who : a multiple-people icon for everyone, a people-in-a-box icon for closed group (experienced), and a person-with-printout for developers.
how : no ideas at the moment 🙂
when : a clock-face/stopwatch for real-time, a weekly calendar for most people 🙂 and perhaps a snail for everything else?
Ultimately, this should be machine-parseable, so an XML expression should be used as well.
I don’t think it’ll catch on, unless some large project aggregator like sourceforge chooses to promote it – perhaps they should!
I think the choice of the octagon is not good enough. Why did the author choose it? When used with a small font, like in the article, it looked almost the same like the circle.
I think a square would look better. A circle, a star, a square. Even the child can discern between them, even if used with small fonts
Very interesting for sure. The interesting part isn’t the content itself as much as the effort to codify and unify the presentation of such information.
I’m not totally convinced by the choice of symbols and colors: the octagon looks a lot like a circle (check the leftmost example), and I have a hard time to see the progression from circle to octagon through star. I’d rather see circle-square-star. On the border front, similarly I have a hard time seeing the logic from full gray to black through half-gray (and maybe I would make the yellow color a bit bolder and a bit more orange-ish).
Overall, a really cool idea.
All this nonsense is some college kid trying to get the FOSS Userbase to do the actual legwork for his paper or something.
The FOSS base does the actual work and the people who create these lame articles get to say to their instuctors/professors “See how those people are implementing the ideas I presented in my paper”?
Sorry, but I already have my Diploma. I’m not letting others work for me but have offered something in the public domain. You can take it or leave it. I didn’t start a sourceforge project because the idea of a logo must be accepted first before it makes sense to promote them “officially”. Maybe, after this discussion, I start a project at sourceforge, but at the moment I just want to offer an idea. Maybe, some group likes it and wants to overtake the project.
This said, if you don’t like the logos, create a version 1.1 and offer it as well (possibly to me, so that I announce it at sourceforge).
I chose the octagon because it remembered me to the german stop sign. That’s it.
It’s too complicated. All you need are three symbols – very helpful developers, fairly helpful developers and unhelpful developers.
Also, call it something else. People will glance at “common creatives”, think it says “creative commons” and ignore it. It’s also a bit cheeky, as you have nothing to do with CC, so you shouldn’t imply a link by the name.
Unhelpful developers will like this only if it works as a big **** off sign to clueless users. Otherwise no-one will touch it.
Start with a simple rating of 1-5 of user-responsivenes. Then you can codify it in symbolism that is instantly obvious (1-5 stars, say). Set up an _independent_ web portal where people can stop by and cast a vote for various projects. Those projects who consider themselves to be user-friendly would encourage their user-base to stop by and vote, and if they got a 4 or 5 star rating they would be happy to display the logo. (yes, you need a system for avoiding astroturfing, bla, bla, but that’s a technical issue.) It would be interesting to see how a project rates itself vs. how voters rate it.
This is obviously not as descriptive as what you’re proposing, but it’s simplicity gives it a better chance of catching on. Later, once people are used to the idea, you can start making it more sophisticated. The basic idea of having a simple symbolic indication of the level of response you can expect is good, but it is not clear that your actuall system is the way to go. So, set up something very simple to start with, and then set up a forum or the like where community members can debate the idea and devise the details of the system in a collaborative way. That will also give it more credibility.
Actually, I think that it’s not too much.
Imagine a scale from 1 to 5. Level 5 would be live support for everyone. Level 4 would be at best just a notch below that, i.e. live support for developers and experienced users, schema/48h for others.
Imagine a beginner user, seeing a “4 out of 5” rating in response time, seeing himself forced to use a set of web forms and wait 2 days to get a response. That definitely wouldn’t feel like 4 out of 5 for most people.
Setting explicit numbers allows to properly set expectations (and to be honest 48h is a very short turnaround for a bug database, 1 or 2 weeks or even a month wouldn’t be that bad in many cases).