Openmoko on Design

[William Lai]

No bad intentions for snipping,
Just trying to get to the facts:

Brian C wrote:
> <snipped>
> 1) Who is Openmoko's "design department"?


That would be:

William Lai - PM
Regina Kim - Testing
Wendy Hung - Testing


> 2) Many in the community believed that Openmoko wanted the community to
> contribute code to the core applications/functionality of the software
> stack.  Is this not the case?


This is still the case, yes.


> 3) If the design department is operating from a design document, has it
> been made public?  If so, where?  If not, why not?
>

Design doc uploaded (sometime in April)
http://people.openmoko.org/ninjutsu/freerunner1.4.swf

Posted by Ian Darwin in May
http://lists.openmoko.org/pipermail/community/2008-May/017504.htm

Feature Plan tracking
http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/ASU_Feature_Plan

Bug Tracking:
https://docs.openmoko.org/trac/milestone/ASU

You get the point.


> Sean responded with a lengthy email.  It illustrated again why he is the
> CEO.  A CEO needs to be focused on the big picture, as was his response.
>  A CEO also needs to point his or her team and the customers towards
> that vision.  Sean's email was great at this.  However, I think many in
> the community just wanted some specific answers to the questions above.


Read Above.


> <snipped> 
> And while we didn't get any answer to question (1)--who is the design
> team?--we were told that an answer to question (3)--is there a design
> doc?--would require working as an Openmoko employee for several months.


Yes and No.  Ian Darwin found my asu flash doc, and I sure as hell don't 
remember telling him where it was..


>  I think the implication of this has to be that, No, there isn't a
> single design document that can be pointed to at this moment that
> explains every decision made or priority had by the Openmoko team.  OK.
>  Fine.
> 

Every decision?  No.
I can try to help,
but I barely remember what I had for breakfast..


> <snipped>
> But the community can have (at least) two distinct ways of helping with
> that giant TODO list.  1) The community can build applications that run
> on a framework delivered to us by the Openmoko team; 


Yes.


or 2) the community
> can be directly involved in working on the underlying framework on the
> device; 


Yes.


or 3) both.
> 

Yes.


> It was this incident with the keyboard that made several people believe
> option (2) was not available, and even after Sean's message, I still
> don't believe that we know the answer.  So, I'll ask again: does
> Openmoko intend to allow direct code contributions by community members
> to core components of the ASU/FSO frameworks?  


Yes.


> If so, will such
> community members also have a voice in underlying design decisions that
> guide that/those framework(s)?
> 

It already is.
We've offered a couple of different solutions to community requests that 
were declined by, well, engineering.  One of them was:

* create a package to be installed through installer adding manual 
qwerty button to illume theme.


> Further, a number of developers have repeatedly asked with respect to
> option (1): How do I design my application to work with so many
> different stacks?  What should I be targeting?  Sometimes this gets
> answered with: "Take your pick!  The ultimate goal is for all such
> applications to work regardless


How do I design a website for Safari, Firefox, Internet Explorer?
Think about it.

Openmoko is to mobile
Firefox is to internet

'Firefox' supports
html
xhtml
dhtml
php
java
flash
...

I am by no means a technical person,
does this help?

> 
> Again: it's been less than a month that the device has been on sale.  I
> believe the Openmoko team has clearly been working overtime and doing a
> great job at an overwhelming-sized task.  


Thank you.


> Everyone take a deep breath
> and let's find ways to work together.  
> 

Sure.

-

Will