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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