Re: Reboot: Strategic goals for GNOME
Hi, On Wed, 2010-03-03 at 04:35 -0600, Andrew Savory wrote: Hi, snip Focussing in on one area that I can talk about: Qt is perceived by some to be stronger from a business perspective due to the 'more complete' offering: extensive documentation and an SDK. Shaun McCance and I were talking about this a couple of weeks ago. I'm not trying to steal his thunder (and I hope he replies on list) but he has spent a significant amount of time in the last couple of weeks and has put together some thoughts around planning new Developer Docs on lgo[1]. Perhaps more focus on and promotion of GNOME's developer tools/sdk offerings would be a useful meta-goal for the coming year? Somehow enunciating the proposition that you don't need to be an alpha-dog developer to get engaged with GTK etc. For example, I only recently found out about Anjuta: it's presumably a fairly important tool for people developing using GNOME technologies, but look at the results at http://www.google.com/search?q=anjutaas_sitesearch=www.gnome.org (Yes, I know there's a ton of stuff at library.gnome.org, I'm being devil's advocate here ...) Andrew. I agree some promotion on GNOME developer tools is a good idea. There is no question from a marketing / segmentation standpoint we serve multiple groups, including users (focus this year on GNOME 3.0), developers and others such as OEM partners, ISVs, etc. But we have a chicken and the egg problem - we need to have the tools and documentation ready, whether that's developer docs, code snippets, before we do some promotion, in my opinion. I've also been watching Jono Bacon drive a similar initiative within the Ubuntu community around Opportunistic Development which has some interesting parallels to this discussion. (They're doing a whole week of activities right now on this). [2] [1] http://live.gnome.org/DocumentationProject/Planning/DeveloperDocs [2] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuOpportunisticDeveloperWeek Paul ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Fwd: Meeting Minutes Published - February 18, 2010
The meeting minutes for the February 18th board meeting is now public. Refer here: http://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Minutes/20100218 Other past board meetings are archived here: http://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Minutes -- text of the latest minutes follows -- Minutes for Meeting of February 18th, 2010 Next Meeting * March 4th, 2010 Attending * Behdad Esfahbod * Brian Cameron * Diego Escalante Urrelo * Germán Póo-Caamaño * Jorge Castro * Lucas Rocha (late) * Rosanna Yuen * Stormy Peters * Vincent Untz Regrets * Srinivasa Ragavan Recurring Items * Review past action items. * Did each person with action items send their status reports to the board list before the meeting? * Approve and make sure that minutes of last meeting were published to foundation-announce and foundation-list. * Make sure to start up the gobby server for better note taking. * System administrator hiring - waiting for funding. * Update foundation.gnome.org website. New Items * Lucas Rocha is stepping down from the board. The board wished Lucas goodbye and extended a warm welcome to Jorge Castro, who is joining the board to replace Lucas. * GUADEC Update o Koen Martens from the GUADEC organizing team joined the board meeting to provide a GUADEC update. o The board agreed that GNU Hacker meeting will be co-located with GUADEC 2010. + http://www.gnu.org/ghm/2009/ o Website update. The main GUADEC website designer is Vinicious Depizzol. The website is not being developed as quickly as the organizers expected. o The board and local organizers are currently working to seek sponsors. Need to do more work since we only have one sponsor right now. o Koen suggested that the organizers are not providing enough information on the planning list. There is good communication working with the local organizers, such as Reinout. It was suggested that better communication with the larger community via the planning list could help to improve overall organization. + Behdad suggests to Koen to ask the local GNOME community and larger GNOME community for help. The GNOME community will highlight problems as they are noticed, and providing progress reports to the larger community will help such review. * Hewlett-Packard and ACCESS have stepped down from the GNOME Advisory Board. * GUADEC training as proposed by Dave Neary. o Contract is currently under legal and board review. o ACTION: Stormy will forward the latest contract to the board for review. * BODHost o BODHost has made an offer to provide the GNOME community with web services at no cost. They said that if the The GNOME Project website is hosted with BODHost, that they will offer The GNOME Foundation their services as sponsorship and also provide complete managed 24x7 live support along with the servers that they will provide. In return the GNOME Foundation provides a simple link on the GNOME website footer. o These web services are currently provided by Red Hat at no cost. o The GNOME sysadmin team should decide if this is an opportunity the GNOME Foundation should take advantage of. o ACTION - Behdad will follow-up on the sysadmin list about the BODHost offer to provide the GNOME community with web services at no cost. * XIPWire o XIPWire provides a service to offer mobile phone donation services, so people can donate money to the GNOME Foundation via mobile phones. o GNOME can participate in their Mobile Giving Foundation if we pay $300 (US). o If we do this, the GNOME Marketing team should have a plan on how to advertise it and how to make it work. o ACTION - Stormy will notify the marketing list that there is budget for the $300 (US) needed if a marketing plan can be put into place. * PyGTK+ o ACTION - Jorge will ping J5 to coordinate what is necessary to improve PyGTK+ maintainership. * Board member review process o Diego has recommended that the board have a self-review process. Something similar to a 360° review process. o ACTION - Diego will lead the board member review process: pick a date, send reminders and coordinate with Stormy the missing members surveys. * Co-location in 2011 o Has been announced to KDE board. + ACTION -
Re: Reboot: Strategic goals for GNOME
On Wed, 2010-03-03 at 08:08 -0600, Paul Cutler wrote: Hi, On Wed, 2010-03-03 at 04:35 -0600, Andrew Savory wrote: Hi, snip Focussing in on one area that I can talk about: Qt is perceived by some to be stronger from a business perspective due to the 'more complete' offering: extensive documentation and an SDK. Shaun McCance and I were talking about this a couple of weeks ago. I'm not trying to steal his thunder (and I hope he replies on list) but he has spent a significant amount of time in the last couple of weeks and has put together some thoughts around planning new Developer Docs on lgo[1]. Thanks Paul. I'm not sure what else I can add. As a developer myself, if I can't make headway with a platform in an evening, I usually look for alternatives. And there are almost always alternatives. There are many ways we can lower the barrier to entry for working with our platform. Improving and promoting easy developer tools is a huge win. Hats off to everybody working on that. Another way to level the learning curve is through better developer documentation. We can do better. A lot better. So back to the vision thing, what if we applied the old simple, usable, beautiful thing to our platform? The effects of this are huge. Along with better development tools and better documentation, this also means finding APIs that are difficult or cumbersome to use and fixing them. It means removing every roadblock we possibly can. (And don't worry about stealing my thunder. I don't care who makes it happen. I just care that it gets done.) -- Shaun ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Reboot: Strategic goals for GNOME
Proposed project vision: Hidden in plain sight: Everyone using GNOME, no-one noticing This proposed goal might be ill-advised, because it's very good to be noticed if one do something good. Especially for a project that needs to attract support from people. We probably could have had moblin be GNOME Netbook. We probably could have had Maemo be GNOME Smartphone. Or Sugar be GNOME Education. It is fine if they promote GNOME, but remember that Maemo contains non-free software, so we wouldn't want GNOME to be too closely associated with it. Sugar is a good thing, but it is a different interface -- is it connected with GNOME? ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Reboot: Strategic goals for GNOME
On Wed, Mar 3, 2010 at 3:49 PM, Richard Stallman r...@gnu.org wrote: We probably could have had moblin be GNOME Netbook. We probably could have had Maemo be GNOME Smartphone. Or Sugar be GNOME Education. It is fine if they promote GNOME, but remember that Maemo contains non-free software, so we wouldn't want GNOME to be too closely associated with it. Maemo/Moblin/MeeGo use GNOME and we are proud of that. Of course, we always encourage organizations and projects to use more free software but we should not ostracise them because they don't use 100% free software. These projects help fund, improve and promote GNOME. They hire many of our community members to work on GNOME, they fund hackfests and they fund our events. As our downstream partners, they are also members of our advisory board. Sugar is a good thing, but it is a different interface -- is it connected with GNOME? Sugar uses many GNOME technologies and they are interested in working with us to improve GNOME, free software user interfaces and to promote free software in developing countries. Sugar Labs sits on our advisory board. Stormy ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Reboot: Strategic goals for GNOME
On Wed, 2010-03-03 at 10:09 +0100, Dave Neary wrote: Like I say, I'm not happy with the vision part of this (GNOME everywhere, and invisible) I'm not happy with the invisible part either. We *do* compete with three other desktops: Windows, Mac OS, and KDE. Unless people know what GNOME is, a) people won't consciously value a choice (of distro, or by a company, school, government, etc) including it. b) the GNOME skills on people's resumes won't mean anything to anyone, thereby reducing to zero the professional development value to the individual of contributing to our ecosystem. If we're not sexy and hot (as a technology) then why would people want to be involved? If no one knows what who we are, then how are we supposed to make a marketing impact that anyone cares about? It's not enough that a few people on #gnome-hackers know what GNOME is [yes, I actually heard someone say that a few days ago, arguing that distros are the only customer we need to care about. I couldn't disagree more] The above also applies for why we need to be aware that GTK is integral to our platform and that we compete with Qt over it. AfC Sydney signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Reboot: Strategic goals for GNOME
I think there is a major inflection point underway which GNOME should internalize. The combination of technologies going under the name HTML 5 have made/are making web technology based applications finally competitive with those built using conventional toolkits such as Qt, GTK+, and the Windows and Mac equivalents. This provides a major opportunity; but I have seen little thought or discussion of how Gnome can/should take advantage of this. Food for thought - Jim Gettys ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Reboot: Strategic goals for GNOME
On Wed, Mar 3, 2010 at 9:18 PM, Jim Gettys j...@freedesktop.org wrote: The combination of technologies going under the name HTML 5 have made/are making web technology based applications finally competitive with those built using conventional toolkits such as Qt, GTK+, and the Windows and Mac equivalents. This provides a major opportunity; but I have seen little thought or discussion of how Gnome can/should take advantage of this. That's why Shell is JS and CSS. To everyone else, can we steer the conversation more toward what I can produce a video about regarding 3.0 30 days from today? Now is not the time to discuss ways to convert people or new features we could add for 3.x; that was a year ago. Today is crunch time. ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
