Name: Joachim Noreiko Email: jnoreiko AT yahoo DOT com Affiliation: none In December 2005 I wandered into the GNOME Documentation Project and stayed. That's the simple version of why I'm here.
The longer story is that getting involved in GNOME has actually been frustrating, annoying, and infuriating. It's had me tearing my hair out and yelling at the screen. Frankly, I think it's only because of my bloody-mindedness that I didn't just walk away, on countless occasions. Getting involved in GNOME is HARD. The website looks stagnant and hardly inviting. Dig a little deeper, and developer.gnome.org shows you documents that date from 2002, about software that no longer exists or has radically changed since. Mailing lists are strange, alien places to people who don't come from hacker culture. The same goes for IRC. When you finally manage to get someone to at least give you a few tips to get started, you attach your first patch to bugzilla... and then nothing happens. Since December 2005 I've been trying to change all that. I remain a member of the GNOME Documentation Project. Along with other contributors, I've been working on bringing our user documentation up to date. I'm looking at ways to keep it that way, by spreading the GDP's workload throughout the cycle instead of the final few weeks of freeze, as this has proved unfeasible on the two occasions I've been involved. Looking further ahead, I'll be behind the big push to update developer documentation once the new documentation site library.gnome.org goes live. I'm also a member of the GNOME Web team. I'm coordinating several of the goals in the www.gnome.org revamp, and I expect I'll be writing quite a lot of the content. Our website is our principal way of attracting new blood, and I hope that when this goes live it will bring new contributors. Technical change is complex, because what can seem trivial often depends on so many other things. That's why it's taken so long to rebuild our website, and why the GNOME User Guide is so unwieldy. But social change is even harder to bring about. As a board member, I want to work to lower the barriers to entry that block potential GNOME contributors. I hope that my work on the website and documentation will play a part in that, but I also think more can be done socially. Efforts such as GNOME Love and Patch Squad need more help, for example. I want to make GNOME more coherent. I'd like to see GNOME Certification come about, and that will entail bringing the HIG up to date. I'd like to see more GNOME marketing efforts, which will mean more planning of our release right from the start of the development cycle. Perhaps the hardest part of all this will be encouraging people to work on things that are necessary, but not that much fun. Coming from the Documentation Project, I know that not everything is fun. Oh, and throughout this, I've tried to respond to patches that fall under my remit, especially when they are from new contributors, within a couple of days. When I can no longer do that, I'll know I've taken too much on. Send instant messages to your online friends http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com _______________________________________________ foundation-announce mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-announce
