[Lumiera] The Logo and the Community

[Christian Thaeter]

Raffaella Traniello wrote:
> Ciao!
> 
> I do have a personal opinion on the proposed logos, but I prefer to step
> back and have a more distant point of view on the Logo issue.
> 
> 	Hints to "waste of time" or "waste of work" for logos: 
> 
> It's like saying that hacking on a git experimental branch is a waste of
> time and work. There are hackers of code and there are hackers of images
> and logos. Hacking is an urge. You can't help developing ideas if you
> are an image hacker, just like you can't help breathing.
> 
> Effective communication's Rule #1: don't invent problems and give
> correct attribution to the problem.
> If spending the designers time to develop ideas and logos is not a
> problem for the designers, why should it be a problem for the core devs?
> Designers don't do that for money (they have never been even mentioned).
> Designers don't do that for winning the contest (it has never been
> announced). They do it because they want to. They may be image hackers
> or just people happy to give something back to the Cinelerra community
> or designers looking for a design exercise. Or they can have a thousand
> of other worthy reasons. In any case the designer time is under the
> jurisdiction of designers. It's not a devs problem. Just like how devs
> choose to spend their time is not a designer problem.
> I think that the grain of dust I felt in the Communication mechanism is
> due to this involuntary pushiness, where the devs judged the logo
> contributors personal field.
> I know enough the core devs and the contest in which Lumiera is growing
> to be very far from the risk of misunderstanding the real meaning of the
> devs' words.
> 
> 	Which community?
> 
> I also know enough of the project to recognise there is a certain
> uneasiness around the logo issue, as slippery as an eel, bouncing from
> Mailing List to IRC to Wiki and back, never important enough to be
> discussed.  
> Yes, sure, the code is the main part of the Lumiera project. But it is
> not the only one. And saying that I don't mean to point the light to the
> logo itself but rather on the community that is contributing a lot of
> logos and ideas.
> And the community is vital just like the code. We all can see how
> CinelerraHV has been weakened but the lack of community both of devs and
> of users.
> For that reason, I now stand on my Italian non-dev chair and I
> officially ask to talk about the community. I do think it's a good
> investment.
> 
> I think the main reason for the logo uneasiness is an ambiguity: it has
> been always talked about "community" but in fact it has never been
> defined *which kind* of community Lumiera is going to have.
> 
> Lumiera could be a project where a lot of people help the core devs,
> giving good ideas, good code, different points of view, help with the
> site, with the logo, with the future user documentation and support... A
> kind of pyramidal collaboration where all the voluntary contributions go
> to the core devs and/or where the devs "hire" a voluntary contributor
> for a specific task. This is a "headed" community model, with pro and
> cons.
> 
> Lumiera could be a project where the core devs are the people
> responsible for the main development and maintenance of the code and
> where other people are in charge for other tasks like documentation,
> website, image (logo...), users and artist forum... or even subsections
> of the code. A kind of horizontal collaboration where independent and
> responsible modules of the project cooperate to form a sigle and
> coherent entity. This is a "distributed" community model, with pro and
> cons. 
> 
> I can't help thinking at SVN and GIT but I'm not sure the analogy fits. 
> 
> I think that cehteh and ichthyo are the mothers of Lumiera (yes, mothers
> because of the labour). And they should decide which community model
> they want Lumiera to grow in. 
> They have to decide if they want the logo chosen vertically or
> horizontally; they have to decide how much they want to delegate the
> non-dev tasks (that is the responsibility of the tasks).
> 
> 	Logo-Task-Force
> 
> I personally find the present ambiguity between horizontal and vertical
> model very unsettling and thus demotivating.
> 
> The Logo-Task-Force idea looks to me "Head model" style.
> The Logo competition idea* looks to me "Distributed model" style.
> 
> * By logo competition I mean one or more wiki pages with a collection of
> ideas, discussion and community contributes to improve the proposals,
> followed by a community on-line vote (around 700 people invited to vote)
> once the proposals are discussed enough. Of corse I'd volunteer for
> organising it.
> 
> Please, cehteh and ichthyo: be clear about your vision of community.
> 
> Ciao!
> Raffa
> 
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