The only thing I might add to the design scheme is an account of the social and productive relations: how to build into the design a permanent invitation for developers to contribute to the toolkit. We might think of this -- and I write as more or less an amateur -- in "extreme programming" terms: of building in a system of rewards for volunteers that would accrue on an immediate and regular basis. This is no news, really: I think we are heading in this direction already, and all I'm suggesting is that we might talk about it a little bit more along the way. I'm thinking about how wonderful it has been for me to have had a number of excellent programmers give me all sorts of help -- I am new to this business -- and to have witnessed them do simply tons of work on the things that interest them: I am completely impressed by the variety of motivations contributing to such voluntarism: working an a good cause is fine, but abstract; working on a tool that I can use is more direct; building something that is state-of-the-art appeals to our professionalism; and building things togther is fun and the kind of work I, and many of my users, would like to do -- stuff like that. I am learning that such voluntarism is among the defining features of our community, and I think it is among the defining features of the application itself. That is, for my interest in the development of the user-friendly and user-modifiable interfact, that as we make room for the user's creativity we would increase not only the system's efficiency, but also, contribute to the kinds of cooperative social relations so many of us prize.
