Meaning of this Muse Group thing

Hello everyone,

sorry if I’m just a bit slow, but English and especially corporate speech such as exhibited in the quote on https://www.audacityteam.org/audacity-musescore-announcement/ are not what I am best at for understanding. I’d kindly like to ask what this is about – what does this ‘administration change’ imply? Why did Audacity as a project do this? And how does it affect the project if someone claiming to be ‘in charge’ of it makes jokes about not even understanding basic UI?

My last question might be a bit pointed but I don’t know how to phrase this better. I do not want to nag about or anything. I am genuinely interested in how and why this decision was made, and I feel like others might be interested in a bit of elaboration, too.

Thank you very much,

guv

Hi, ex-lurker here,

I am not involved with Audacity or MuseScore in any way, but I am doing a masters in community development. And here are my community-based thoughts about your questions.

  1. What does “administration change” imply?

One implication of this kind of “administration change” is that the people who are currently involved with operations and making sure things get done felt that things weren’t being done well enough with the existing staff/volunteers they have. It could mean that the person (or people) who normally helped do the administration work want to do other things or think that they’d be more helpful without having to do administrative work as well. Adding one more person to take on that administrative workload can help shift the balance of how things get done so that it’s done more efficiently and effectively, without overloading the existing administrative staff.

  1. Why did Audacity as a project do this?

My completely uniformed guess is that the existing team felt that they were not as effective or efficient as they could be and they wanted to have someone who was not an existing project member come in to do the work, rather than spread themselves thinner.

  1. [How] does it affect the project if someone claiming to be ‘in charge’ of it makes jokes about not even understanding basic UI?

I’m a somewhat casual fan of Martin Keary’s (Tantacrul’s) work through his association with the David Bruce Composer YouTube channel’s “5 Composers, One Theme” series. This is the biographic information for his channel:

Interested in music or design? In this channel, I delve into novel and interesting aspects of song-writing, composition, visual aesthetics and design-oriented disciplines with the goal of being both informative, well researched and entertaining. This channel isn’t about repeating material you can find elsewhere.

I am an active composer with national and international awards in classical composition and a > UX/UI designer > with experience working on software that’s used by millions of people (I’ve worked on high profile projects for > Microsoft, PlayStation and Ubuntu> ). I also like to occasionally have a bit of fun – so > you’ll sometimes see me being a little mean> . Why not? It’s YouTube. (emphasis mine)

I’ve highlighted the parts of his bio that are relevant to your question: he is a highly experience UX/UI designer, he has worked with diverse user-bases, and he can be mean-spirited sometimes.

I was in the middle of watching the video when I decided to respond to your post, and what I think that while Tantacrul was indeed cracking jokes about the Audacity logo, I can conclude that Martin Keary is knowledgable enough about UI/UX to feel confident that his jokes include a fair assessment of Audacity’s existing UI/UX.

In short, I think that having someone with his kind of energy, experience, and sense of humor join Audacity Team will affect the project in a positive way.