Paper, though looking hard at a Galaxy Note for my next phone. (I really do miss my old Newton and Palm. How did Steve Jobs go from a fan of caligraphy to the man who killed pen computing?)
I'm not sure I agree, at least not regarding the early stages of projects. IN my experience, software, like any creative endeavor, does not lend itself well to "design by committee" - maybe by small teams, but not large groups.
In later stages, once initial core concepts have gelled into into an initial release, opening up the process can be valuable - design review, finding bugs extending, support, .... But, it strikes me that the early phases require concentrated focus by at most a tiny team of designers.
There's a lot of history to back this up - the most successful open source projects I know of (Apache, Sendmail, Linux) started out as small projects that were open sourced after they'd reached a basic level of maturity. The same is true in the protocol world - TCP/IP, for example, started as a collaboration between Cerf and Kahn - the RFC process, "rough consensus and running code," multiple implementations came next.
Authored Comments
Paper, though looking hard at a Galaxy Note for my next phone. (I really do miss my old Newton and Palm. How did Steve Jobs go from a fan of caligraphy to the man who killed pen computing?)
I'm not sure I agree, at least not regarding the early stages of projects. IN my experience, software, like any creative endeavor, does not lend itself well to "design by committee" - maybe by small teams, but not large groups.
In later stages, once initial core concepts have gelled into into an initial release, opening up the process can be valuable - design review, finding bugs extending, support, .... But, it strikes me that the early phases require concentrated focus by at most a tiny team of designers.
There's a lot of history to back this up - the most successful open source projects I know of (Apache, Sendmail, Linux) started out as small projects that were open sourced after they'd reached a basic level of maturity. The same is true in the protocol world - TCP/IP, for example, started as a collaboration between Cerf and Kahn - the RFC process, "rough consensus and running code," multiple implementations came next.