The previous email was simply an email sent in a hurry. And it is being treated out of proportion.

I assure you we have no intent of working without consensus.

I sent an 'immediate follow up email' where I specifically stated that folks should join the 'Monday meeting' which has been set up for this purpose along with general feature roundup. Discussions and mocks will be posted on mediawiki to follow up for those who cannot participate so they can join in with comments.

The reason this occurred is because the email was sent in a hurry.

I would also request everyone to understand that we are shortstaffed on the design team.

We have been unable to hire a visual designer since Lindsey left around September last year.

Munaf and I are covering production work on E2, E3 and Mobile & design Outreach. This includes both interaction and visual design.

Just to put things into perspective: It takes one hour to make a simple icon if it has to be done right.

The email sent in a hurry because at any given time 2 designers are balancing a lot of work and sometimes we need to close things out or narrow solutions before we can manage a discussion between 15 people.

Please recognize that we are doing our best to make sure teams are supported. We absolutely acknowledge that remote staff needs to and must be involved.

If anyone has any concerns please feel free to chat with Howie and me. I would really appreciate that we close this thread.

It is simply a misunderstanding and nothing else.

Thanks

Vibha

On Sat, Mar 30, 2013 at 8:38 AM, Oliver Keyes <okeyes@wikimedia.org> wrote:

So, wide-in-scope-and-slightly-TL;DR followup:

I'd ask for us to avoid statements like "if you want to see them, come by my desk".

This is not something specific to this situation, and I want to take clear I'm not taking issue with anyone in particular (Vibha and I discussed the issue, the designs will be in the Monday meeting, no harm, no foul)., but: I think we have a tendency to have a lot of discussions in-office. This is something I noticed particularly on my most recent visit to the WMF HQ, when it became clear precisely how many discussions and ideas were being had and nixed and pushed forward before seeing the light of day from a remote worker's perspective, probably aided by meetings people like Siebrand, Tomasz, Arthur and I have been having with HR and OIT about bridging the office-remote divide. It's being done becaise we all want the WMF to work efficiently and quickly. This is understandable, it's laudable, it's inevitable given the state of perpetual pressure we're under; we have a thousand things we need to fix and only the resources to fix ten correctly. We need to move fast and we need to move in the right direction so that we can get *something*, the 90 percent product, out rather than spending eternity spinning our wheels on the 100 percent product. But, here's the rub: much like the relationship between quitting drinking and living longer, keeping things in-person doesn't actually make us move faster, it just makes it feel faster.

Like it or not, we've got geographically distributed employees. A lot of them work from SF, sure, but we've got people in Spain, the Netherlands, India, Australia, the UK. And when important discussions happen in-person, we exclude them from the conversation. This doesn't make things faste