As per my comment on #foundation, am forwarding here my comments about specific topics discussed during the meeting.
GNOME Foundation meeting Sat. Jan 30, 2010 GNOME Panel Applets During the GNOME Foundation meeting I brought up my concern with the following scenarion: User Mongo is a casual desktop user that came to rely on several applets to keep up with the weather, email notifications, and the time. He's also been using the Hamster applet to track his time and the keyboard layout switcher when he's doing translations for some of the open source projects he works on. One day he wakes up and is greeted by his system's package management system informing that there are updates available, including GNOME 3.0 bits. He clicks on the "Update" button and after several minutes is notified that his system is up to date and (perhaps?) that he should restart his system. He does so and once the system is back up he is surprised that most of his applets are gone. He tries to add them back to the panel using the same process he's used in the past but to no avail. After several frustrating minutes, Mongo is feeling very upset. Anyhow, my main objective describing this scenario is to alert against the potential alienation of our user base when things simply vanish from their systems without a clear explanation. It would be wise then to have some type of notification to the user explaining: a) that some of his applets (maybe enumerate them too) have been removed from the panel due to x, y, and z; b) assuming there is a work around for adding individual applets back to the panel, provide steps on how to do it; c) offer a way for the user to file an issue requesting that said applet get "ported" to take advantage of the notification system included with 3.0; If we can answer these 3 bullets now or soon, it would be appropriate to start educating our users about the upcoming changes and how to properly deal with them by providing clear documentation in all the "main entrance" web sites and systems our uses are bound to reach out when in doubt. Co-located Hackfests It was brought up by zana and seconded by others that a co-located hackfest prior to a possible co-located bigger event such as GUADEC would make more sense, as we could get people from different communities discussing and collaborating on similar issues, sharing their pains/knowledge and trying to pool together processes and ideas for dealing with them. Then, a co-located GUADEC could schedule co-located sessions where these teams would present their findings, etc, etc. I am planning to write up a proposal for a co-located localization hackfest where we could gather a few representatives from different communities (think KDE, Xfce, GNOME, LXDE, etc) to discuss about the types of issues their respective projects are facing, how they've solved it, what is there to be improved, etc. The objective is to shed a light on what some of the common issues are and share general knowledge that will hopefully improve their own processes. -- Og B. Maciel omac...@foresightlinux.org ogmac...@gnome.org ogmac...@ubuntu.com GPG Keys: D5CFC202 http://www.ogmaciel.com (en_US) http://blog.ogmaciel.com (pt_BR) _______________________________________________ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
