Yeah, ok, we get that Matt Thomas doesn’t need any notice whatsoever to do WordPress design projects, but has it crossed your mind that this may be because it is his JOB?
Anyway, the way I read it, the issue with the has-patch marathon was not so much that people had no notice, it was that wp-hackers didn’t get a heads-up before the rest of the world thus making it uncomfortably clear exactly how unimportant they are. It’s partly this perception of their own irrelevance, of course, which necessitates these events in the first place; if your experience of submitting patches is that they get ignored or dismissed then you don’t have much incentive to keep doing it. It’s all very well to say they don’t need a deadline to contribute, but, hello, we’re talking about geeks here. They appreciate structure and measurable goals, not to mention reassurance that their efforts will actually be noticed.
I cannot shake the suspicion that this drive to get designers involved with the development process is an attempt to divert them from theme production. (We have enough troublesome theme developers already; the last thing Automattic wants is to encourage them.) Also, if boring things such as tweaking the user interface can be outsourced to students working for nothing, that frees up the inhouse design team to work on fun stuff like themes. .com users are always bitching about not having enough themes; why hire outsiders to produce them when you already have designers on the payroll?
The flaw in this plan? Well, I sort of wonder whether doing boring stuff for no pay is going to be quite as appealing to the community as doing fun stuff for no pay. We’ll see.
