Design by Committee sucks

I'm currently attendending 1st KnowARC Conference in Oslo. As I do not have a big group to discuss my research with (although I highly appreciate the discussions with my supervisor, it is also monoculture), it is important that I get out and collaborate. Also, the topic of my ph.d. study (grid data management) is a quite relevant topic these days.

Yesterday we had a meeting about capability and design on a furture grid data management system. However stuffing ~20 people into a room and let them discuss (only like five where active though) does not produce good results.

As it could be expected people have very different views on what the system should be able to do, and how it should be constructed. However instead of trying to create a reasonably well designed system, we ended up with pretty much the union of everything. This way no one really loses. Unfortunately no one really wins either. The system gets overly complex, and insanely hard to implement (we're talking distributed, fault tolerent, scalable systems). And usually no one will implement anything complete due to the complexity of the system.

Good design can created in many ways. But it does not come from committees which tries to solve everything at once.