Hi folks -- Thanks for the intro, Idan!
I thought I'd just fill in a few things from my point of view and give a bit of background to this: It turned out that quite a group of core devs ended up coming to PyCon a couple weeks ago so we ended up having an impromptu lunch and meeting. One of the topics that came up was the role of design and designers within the Django community. We talked about the fact there's been some frustration lately over our general lack of motion on UI/UX issues. Adrian pointed out that one of Django's long-standing principles has been that design is fundamentally something that doesn't work the same was as open source: many eyes may make for shallow bugs, but many hands make for shitty design. So from the very beginning we treated design differently and let one person, Wilson, be in charge. Of course, Wilson had to go and join a startup* that got successful. Stupid success. But we all pretty agreed that we still think the model of having a design BDFL to vest authority on UI/UX issues was a good model. So we talked about people to fill that role, and Idan was the unanimous choice. He's been contributing to Django for a while now, and most of the core developers have worked with him closely in some capacity or another and all have great things to say about him, his work, and his aesthetic. Most importantly, Idan is great at listening to input and criticism, so we feel strongly that he'll be able to take the design input from the community, digest it, and produce great work. I know that generally we try not to operate in a top-down manner -- and most of our other workflow changes over the last few years have been to *divest* individuals of too much power -- so this may come across as a bit weird to some. Fair enough: it's a bit weird to me, too: I wish we could treat design no different than code. But for whatever reason we've seen time and time again that design-by-committee doesn't work, so we're going to keep doing things this way. So welcome, Idan, and best of luck. I'm really excited to see what happens next! Jacob * Rdio, which everyone should use because it's awesome. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Django developers" group. To post to this group, send email to django-developers@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to django-developers+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/django-developers?hl=en.
