[Bf-committers] Module Owner teams - proposal to extend & formalize it more

Knapp magick.crow at gmail.com
Tue Jun 11 22:52:17 CEST 2013


On Tue, Jun 11, 2013 at 5:21 PM, Jonathan Williamson
<jonathan at cgcookie.com> wrote:
> As an artist I think this is a great idea. All the developers do a great
> job but sometimes the artist feedback is needed to better develop tools and
> features that fit into the artist/production workflow.
>
>
>
> On Tuesday, June 11, 2013, Ton Roosendaal wrote:
>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> ----  "How do I get a feature in Blender" ----
>>       (or, who is making Blender anyway?)
>>
>> I'm a very firm supporter of empowering people who *do*, the ones who can
>> get work done or who have proven to be realizing work before.
>>
>> That reflects in our "Module Owner" organization. Developers who actively
>> contribute to Blender are also the ones who can make decisions in that area.
>> Module teams currently have owners (who can work quite independently) and
>> team members (who need to ensure an owner is being informed and agrees with
>> work).
>> Module teams accept responsibility for bug fixing, patch and code reviews,
>> and help out new developers in the area.
>>
>> In practice - we're really quite awesome in this regard - the module teams
>> have good connections with users. However, I think we're not functioning
>> optimally here. With Blender growing, with more people being active, and
>> with all the high quality demands and requests, we should consider to
>> extend our Module organization now.
>>
>> My proposal is to ask each module team to invite at least one involved
>> user to formally join the module teams. The current owners/teams can do
>> this all based on their current networks, and can decide for each
>> individual whether it's an "owner" or "member" role. For bigger modules,
>> having an artist co-owner is really preferred though.
>>
>> The choice for such users-members can be simply based on the same
>> principle as we do for developers - based on actual achievements in the
>> area and shown interest to be involved.  We can keep module teams
>> self-appointing too, owners decide themselves who's joining. Only when
>> needed, the 'project admins' will interfere in the process.
>>
>> The consequences of this proposal can be quite minimal - it just means you
>> need to get agreement on feature decisions with one more person. Better
>> would be if the new user-members then also actively participate in all
>> discussions, feature proposal reviewing, release logs and communicating
>> decisions when were they made. It will help developers a lot, to offload
>> work to others especially. :)
>>
>> I also want to emphasise that we currently informally already do this a
>> lot. A great example is how motion tracking was implemented with artist
>> Sebastian Koenig as 'owner' too.
>> We also already have several mailing lists with activity for areas as vfx,
>> cycles, python, robotics and animation. We can extend this when needed
>> easily.
>>
>> I know it's not democracy I propose, I really don't think voting is going
>> to get Blender further anytime. Getting more people involved, and having
>> them empowered _is_ helping though. It's still going to be organized chaos,
>> and will go with a lot of squeaky wheel greasing. But hey, that's open
>> source dynamics!
>>
>> For more about the current owner teams:
>> wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:Doc/Process/Module_Owners
>>
>> Note: the current "project admin" team is just three people now. That role
>> hasn't been needed really in the past years, but I'd welcome to have a
>> great (UI) designer member there. This is going to be based on practical
>> involvement & achievements too, based on those who helped out with Blender.
>>
>> Thanks,
>>
>> -Ton-
>>
>> --------------------------------------------------------
>> Ton Roosendaal  -  ton at blender.org <javascript:;>   -   www.blender.org
>> Chairman Blender Foundation - Producer Blender Institute
>> Entrepotdok 57A  -  1018AD Amsterdam  -  The Netherlands
>>
>>
>>
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>> Bf-committers at blender.org <javascript:;>
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>>
>
>
> --
> Jonathan Williamson

Love the idea. One thought, the BF funboard gets lots of cool ideas
but I always have the feeling there that the devs are not reading it.
People often post ideas and then get no or almost no feedback.

For example I posted an idea, I wanted proportional editing to work
not just 2d but 3d. I wanted to pick a point and pull it and have the
points behind it react so that you could get a stretch (like gum where
it gets thinner behind) it. I got one NO WAY and that was about it. I
saw that I could get the same effect by massively subdividing and
using sculpt. I still think it would be nice in edit mode!

My whole point is that it would be good as a user to get more feedback
about ideas. Do all the devs read funboard??



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