On 02/12/2015 07:39 AM, Jaromil wrote:
>
> hi all
>
> the last community curated DWN expresses enthusiasm for a logo design
> which wasn't included in the poll (because absent from the wiki),
>
*** I want to clear a misunderstanding. I wrote this article in DWN,
entirely on my own, and I requested it from Noel to be able to introduce
the #devuan-www team.

I'm very sorry that it created such confusion and led Atari314 to his
decision of leaving the project, and I hope he reconsiders. The concern
Atari314 and Jaromil expressed was about democracy and listening to the
community, and especially for Atari314, that point was even more
important than the logo itself.

Atari314 and I had a couple of conversations last night and this
morning, where I assured him two things: if bureaucracy kicks in in
Devuan, I'll be first to kick its ass, and he responded that I would be
second, after him. I assume he will be back otherwise he cannot comply.

I want to explain why I think the poll is a wrong idea, and why I think
this has nothing to do with democracy. I'm asking you to bear with the
emerging design team, at least until after Devuan Jessie Alpha is
released, which will be sooner than later. If after that the community
still thinks I was wrong to take this path, I'll resign without a fuss
(the second point in my conversation with Atari314).

While nextime has been working almost on his own, without any public
appearance, nobody has been saying anything about how he should do it.
It's not democratic, but so far, everybody expects that he's doing the
right thing. While jaromil has been designing his toy SDK, hacking away
night and day while trying to keep the community's voice and softness
and inclusiveness, nobody came to knock at his door telling him how to
do it. Everybody is waiting patiently to see what's cooking. Nobody
enters the kitchen to bother the cook, yet everybody enjoys the meal.

Yet, when it comes to design, everybody has a strong opinion about how
things work and how they should look like. Don't worry, I'm one of you.
I proposed an esoterically-complex logo, and kickstarted the
Category:Logo on the without-systemd wiki. But I didn't except that
anyone would call for a vote: design by committee is a horrible path to
take. As soon as I saw the poll proposal, I denounced it, and naturally
got closer to the people who were thinking alike.

Yet, I didn't propose *my* logo as the direction to take. Neither did I
*choose* a logo *implementation* among logos implementations. What I
did is gather a couple of people, discuss ideas with them, we all agreed
on a path and *a direction for the logo*, which incidentally seems to be
reflected in the current results of the poll:

- it should remind of Debian, for continuity
- it should use a swirl-D, because d is a natural swirl

Both the "Negative Galaxy" logo proposal, Atari314's "spiral-d" logo
proposal, the two most-voted logo proposals so far, and Alban's proposal
all share the same characteristics. So there's no drama about where
we're going: I should not have written "it darn looks like the Devuan
logo" about Alban's, but the above. I expected "looks like" to be
sufficiently vague as to convey that we're *working on designing a logo
from an idea of a swirl-d*, not choosing from any proposed implementation.

This is exactly why I thought *the poll was a bad idea*: it favors a
canonical situation of [bikeshedding][0] that seriously gets in the way
of productivity. So really, there's no reason to dramatize the
situation, we're just a young project with a strong legacy, and we're
trying to find our marks. There's *nothing about democracy here*: don't
tell me a dozen logo designs and a hundred votes are any representative
of the Devuan community, if you consider that the first alpha release is
yet to be done!

*Please bear with us.* You're welcome to join #devuan-www, but not for
bikeshedding there. We're on a solid track and we intend, as a team, to
pursue it at least until we deliver our first product. After that, you
may judge us what we've done, not for what you think we're doing wrong.
If we fail, it will certainly be time to take another direction. We're
listening, and we're of course part of this community.

==
hk

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law_of_triviality

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