
Why Should I Care What Color the Bikeshed Is? - prakash
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/faq/misc.html#BIKESHED-PAINTING
======
gruseom
Has anyone here read Parkinson's original book? I'd be interested in comments
about it. It's been on my radar for a long time but I haven't got to it yet.

Incidentally, the article is wrong to date Parkinson's Law to the 1960s. It
was very much a creature of the 1950s. That maybe isn't as trivial as it
sounds; IIRC the book was part of the wave of post-WWII systems thinking that
really got going in the 50s. A lot of that stuff remains pretty interesting.
It certainly fed into the cultural explosion that happened later, and was an
early sign of disaffection with 50s rigidity, but is a different sort of
critique.

~~~
pg
I read it, a long time ago. I remember feeling that it had lots of interesting
stuff in it, but that it suffered from the problem of being something that
should have been just an essay, expanded into a book. (Practically 100% of
books on "business" have this problem.) So it's the kind of book that's worth
browsing through, reading bits that catch your attention, but not worth
reading every word of.

~~~
prakash
_So it's the kind of book that's worth browsing through, reading bits that
catch your attention, but not worth reading every word of_

ChangeThis solves this problem quite well.

------
pongle
I have always wondered what I should do with this piece of information. Does
it mean that every proposal I want to have passed by people should be
extremely large and complex? Conversely, if I want to engage people, should is
be over something simple?

Or is it just, take simple decisions yourself and try hard to get input on the
complex ones?

~~~
jrockway
_I have always wondered what I should do with this piece of information._

All it means is that if you want people to implement your idea in an open
source project, send a patch. Ideas don't get the project anywhere, nor does
endless discussion. Shut the fuck up and write some code.

It's even on a T-shirt:
[http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2388/2162805091_44ece496b7_m....](http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2388/2162805091_44ece496b7_m.jpg)

------
ichverstehe
<http://searchyc.com/submissions/bikeshed?sort=by_date>

Move on, nothing to see, kthxplz.

------
baltoo
When presenting designs to clients some firms add a "pink rabbit" to it, i.e.
something that's just too obvious to be ignored by the client. The discussion
will then be steered to what to do about it, how to change it, what color it
should have, etc.

This is a way of deflecting the client's need to "contribute". If there are
other issues with the design those will come up as well, but that initial itch
will be lessened.

------
mrduncan
also: <http://bikeshed.com/>

~~~
aston
Click refresh a few times for the full experience.

~~~
jrockway
I don't like any of those colors. Some are too dark, and others are too light.
I think the color should always be #c0ffee!

------
TrevorJ
I've found this to be true. The solution is to propose every single color that
you DON'T want the shed to be painted, so the only option anyone has to make a
helpful suggestion as to the color is the ONE color you didn't pick...and the
one you wanted in the first place :-D

