Hi all!
As a last act before my step-in in GNOME world, I'd like to point and
share some reflections and some evidences that better explain my gut
feeling about exiguity of newcomers and faint Community outreach outcomes.
I believe that there are 4 matters on the table, which can deserve our
effort as marketing team:
1) Who lead GNOME? Is it still a community driven project?
It seems to me that during last months, many of the Ubuntu contributors
left the Ubuntu projects in which they were involved because they've
felt that the role of Canonical inside Ubuntu overwhelmed community.
Many former Ubuntu contributors I know decided to dedicate their time to
other FOSS projects, because they were tired to work for Canonical and
not for Ubuntu.
At the same time, I've heard many friends considering to work for GNOME
as working, ultimately, for Red Hat.
I don't mind if this is or this isn't the truth, but, if GNOME desires
show itself as a community driven project, probably we could discuss
ways to give the Community an higher profile.
2) Where GNOME is going?
In my post blog I've talked about the circle of trust made by developers
and designers, and the difficulties for a newcomer in joining this circle.
I believe there are at least 2 problems. The first one is that the
(perceived) lack of focus, of guidelines, of roadmap, bring with it the
vibes that everyone could give an hand just giving an hand, and of
course all that create some confusion because if the contribute doesn't
fit to project, it could be useful, or worse.
I well know this problem, e.g. when someone ask me to participate to
Media relations projects, and she/he's not able to distinguish between
press release and (technical) release notes.
Moreover, a not so clearly shared roadmap, and the lack of small tasks,
gives the opportunity to contribute only to those people who are able to
spend many of their time on some projects, or can discuss directly with
project maintainers via IRC channels, IM, and so on.
This is a great way to have full time employed people, but cuts off all
the contributions of that we can call "casual lovers" that, IMHO, are a
large amount of possibly contributors.
From the other side, designers and developers, could have no time to
discuss plenty every detail with everyone who's approaching, but this is
really a leaking of volunteers and contributions.
3) Everything is given
When GNOME Shell has been released, I have been a first time lover, and
one of my friend (a GNOME guy) asked me my feedback about it. I wrote
many blogposts and the conclusion was, in a nutshell, "Very good, too
black to me".
He accepted my provocation of a pink shell (you can take a look here
[1], if you please) and nodded about the usefulness of a light theme,
that never has arrived.
Is very easy to comprehend why many people reconsidering their
participation in GNOME, believing their efforts are totally useless,
because it seems that everything is given.
At last UDS, in CPH, I was attending Andreas talk about new desktop
features (sorry Andreas if I'm trotting you out :) ) and the guy who was
sitting beside me was very disagreeing with Andreas. So I've asked him
to chime-in and explain his doubts, but his answer has been that it was
useless, because everything has already been planned elsewhere.
[1] http://weisghizzi.ilcannocchiale.it/2011/04/26/vita_da_shell.html
4) Is GNOME really welcoming?
Yes, definitely, it is. But, really, single persons are very often much
better than working groups.
As Allan said, there are too much bad même out there, that could
sometimes offer a distort vision of GNOME Community.
I know, sarcasm, irony, jokes, are concrete that make relations of some
part of this community stronger, and they could be very funny, but, by
an outer glance, they could be read as a sign of self-referentiality,
sometimes of some kind of machism too.
I believe that, as marketing team, we should take more spaces (on blogs,
social networks, IRC meetings and so on) to demonstrate that yes, we
could love joking, but here there are people worth to be known and to
work with.
Sorry for loooooooooong mail, I hope my effort in writing this letter
will be appreciate and will be considered my first contribution to make
some of this things better.
Flavia
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