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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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