Re: Need Leadership

[Anders Feder]

søn, 29 06 2008 kl. 12:21 -0500, skrev Diego Escalante Urrelo:
> >  It seems to me you're asking for someone to post Gnome IRC channel
> >  logs...
> >
> 
> Well there's a bunch of reasons why twitter is twitter and irc is irc.
> 

Also I don't think the GNOME IRC channels are actually used like that at
all, even though its a tempting simplification of the problem.

There is very little chat of substance on #gnome-hackers througout the
day and when there is its usually deeply technical stuff. It's almost as
if people are a little afraid of the list of 180+ of nicknames staring
at them.

If you want to know what is happening in the GNOME community right now,
IRC is definitely not the place to be. It's not a place to look someone
over the shoulder and say "oh hey, thats an interesting idea you're
working on there, have you thought of doing _this_ ...".

IRC is two-way real-time communication and all sorts of etiquette
burdens apply. A microblog is your own personal space and you can share
whatever matters to you, whenever it matters.

By the way, I like idea of a character limit as it gives these nice
snack-like messages (unlike mails on the mailing lists, which can get
rather dense).

-- 
Anders Feder <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>

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Re: Need Leadership

[Diego Escalante Urrelo]

On 6/29/08, Jens Granseuer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On 29.06.2008 14:32, Anders Feder wrote:
>
> > søn, 29 06 2008 kl. 02:33 -0500, skrev Diego Escalante Urrelo:
> > > What if we hack a twitter like thing for GNOME where we can drop a
> > > line about what are we doing now or we did this week in GNOME, or
> > > maybe just a random thought.
> >
> > I think this is a cool idea, especially if developers would also drop
> > comments on their random ideas, questions, notes etc. For instance, a
> > developer could ask how to use a particular API, or share an idea for a
> > new project and others could add suggestions, or note the lack of a
> > function or feature in a particular module, which someone then might
> > pick up on and implement etc.
> >
>
>  It seems to me you're asking for someone to post Gnome IRC channel
>  logs...
>

Well there's a bunch of reasons why twitter is twitter and irc is irc.
For our purposes, that twitter is accesible from anywhere where you
have a browser, that messages are broadcasted to all the interested
people, among other things, makes it totally different than irc.

For the proposed idea, the thing with twitter would be:
 - anybody can browse to twitter.com/gnomos and read what we are
thinking/doing in 160 chars or less, miscelanea included
 - it does not require anything else than a browser, no shell for a
bot, no irc client, or grepping logs for "somebody joined", "somebody
quit"
 - 160 chars as a limit is a nice idea imo.

Of course, no one would be forced to anything, if someone doesn't have
twitter or doesn't want to create one, then fine, no problem. After
all this is just an informal way of keeping track of what people does.
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Re: Need Leadership

[Jens Granseuer]

On 29.06.2008 14:32, Anders Feder wrote:

søn, 29 06 2008 kl. 02:33 -0500, skrev Diego Escalante Urrelo:
> What if we hack a twitter like thing for GNOME where we can drop a
> line about what are we doing now or we did this week in GNOME, or
> maybe just a random thought.

I think this is a cool idea, especially if developers would also drop
comments on their random ideas, questions, notes etc. For instance, a
developer could ask how to use a particular API, or share an idea for a
new project and others could add suggestions, or note the lack of a
function or feature in a particular module, which someone then might
pick up on and implement etc.


It seems to me you're asking for someone to post Gnome IRC channel
logs...

Jens
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Re: Need Leadership

[Anders Feder]

søn, 29 06 2008 kl. 02:33 -0500, skrev Diego Escalante Urrelo:
> What if we hack a twitter like thing for GNOME where we can drop a
> line about what are we doing now or we did this week in GNOME, or
> maybe just a random thought.

I think this is a cool idea, especially if developers would also drop
comments on their random ideas, questions, notes etc. For instance, a
developer could ask how to use a particular API, or share an idea for a
new project and others could add suggestions, or note the lack of a
function or feature in a particular module, which someone then might
pick up on and implement etc.

Mikkel Kamstrup briefly touched on a very similar idea in a recent blog
post (http://www.grillbar.org/wordpress/?p=283 ) and I do think he is
right that integrating it with the desktop via e.g. Empathy would make
it more attractive to use (for both readers and contributors) - but I
guess Twitter could be a way to get started.

-- 
Anders Feder <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>

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Re: Need Leadership

[natan yellin]

On Sun, Jun 29, 2008 at 2:29 PM, Sebastian Pölsterl <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote:

> natan yellin schrieb:
>
>> On Sun, Jun 29, 2008 at 2:19 PM, Sebastian Pölsterl <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>> wrote:
>>
>>  Diego Escalante Urrelo schrieb:
>>>
>>>  Hey,

 On 6/28/08, Thomas H.P. Andersen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

  On Fri, Jun 27, 2008 at 6:13 PM, Dave Neary <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>  >
>
>  But this all getting a bit off topic I guess :) I just wanted to point
>  out two things that might motivate developers (ego boosts and personal
>  profit) and see if there are ways we can help those along. The ego
>  boosting is already there. There can be enough hacker energy for weeks
>  in a single "Awesome!" One way we could do more of this could be a
>  periodical vote for the CoolestHacker or whatever.
>
>  What if we hack a twitter like thing for GNOME where we can drop a
 line about what are we doing now or we did this week in GNOME, or
 maybe just a random thought. At the end of the week or biweekly
 someone grabs the best lines and sends a GNOME Almost Weekly News.
 It would work as an informal way of keeping track of what we are doing
 (in human readable format) and a way to comment on what other cool
 guys are doing. Pretty much like twitter:

   I like the idea. That would be an easy way to keep track of what's
>>> happening in GNOME at a central place. The main problem I see is to
>>> convince
>>> developers that they actually post their status updates.
>>>
>>
>> Wouldn't that defeat the purpose. If developers don't want to post,
>> forcing
>> them to do so isn't going to attract more contributors.
>>
>>  I don't want to force developers to post at all. But there should be a
> number of developers that post regularly. Maybe I'm wrong and most
> developers love to post their status updates their. I don't know.
>
I think you're right, but my only point was that if this turns into
something that you need to convince developers to do, then we shouldn't be
doing it.

>
>
>  Besides, isn't this the point of project/people trackers like CIA and
>> Ohloh?
>>
>>  Those sites just track stats. The doesn't tell you what the developer's
> plans are. Sure you could read the commit messages, but it's cumbersome to
> read all new commit messages of the projects you're interested in.
>
I think the best solution would be an improved pgo that could track this
sort of thing. Perhaps it could do so by integrating with twitter like you
suggested.

>
> --
> Greetings,
> Sebastian Pölsterl
>
Natan
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Re: Need Leadership

[Sebastian Pölsterl]

natan yellin schrieb:

On Sun, Jun 29, 2008 at 2:19 PM, Sebastian Pölsterl <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote:


Diego Escalante Urrelo schrieb:


Hey,

On 6/28/08, Thomas H.P. Andersen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:


On Fri, Jun 27, 2008 at 6:13 PM, Dave Neary <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
 >

 But this all getting a bit off topic I guess :) I just wanted to point
 out two things that might motivate developers (ego boosts and personal
 profit) and see if there are ways we can help those along. The ego
 boosting is already there. There can be enough hacker energy for weeks
 in a single "Awesome!" One way we could do more of this could be a
 periodical vote for the CoolestHacker or whatever.


What if we hack a twitter like thing for GNOME where we can drop a
line about what are we doing now or we did this week in GNOME, or
maybe just a random thought. At the end of the week or biweekly
someone grabs the best lines and sends a GNOME Almost Weekly News.
It would work as an informal way of keeping track of what we are doing
(in human readable format) and a way to comment on what other cool
guys are doing. Pretty much like twitter:


 I like the idea. That would be an easy way to keep track of what's
happening in GNOME at a central place. The main problem I see is to convince
developers that they actually post their status updates.


Wouldn't that defeat the purpose. If developers don't want to post, forcing
them to do so isn't going to attract more contributors.

I don't want to force developers to post at all. But there should be a 
number of developers that post regularly. Maybe I'm wrong and most 
developers love to post their status updates their. I don't know.



Besides, isn't this the point of project/people trackers like CIA and Ohloh?

Those sites just track stats. The doesn't tell you what the developer's 
plans are. Sure you could read the commit messages, but it's cumbersome 
to read all new commit messages of the projects you're interested in.


--
Greetings,
Sebastian Pölsterl
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Re: Need Leadership

[natan yellin]

On Sun, Jun 29, 2008 at 2:19 PM, Sebastian Pölsterl <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote:

> Diego Escalante Urrelo schrieb:
>
>> Hey,
>>
>> On 6/28/08, Thomas H.P. Andersen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>>
>>> On Fri, Jun 27, 2008 at 6:13 PM, Dave Neary <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>>>  >
>>>
>>>  But this all getting a bit off topic I guess :) I just wanted to point
>>>  out two things that might motivate developers (ego boosts and personal
>>>  profit) and see if there are ways we can help those along. The ego
>>>  boosting is already there. There can be enough hacker energy for weeks
>>>  in a single "Awesome!" One way we could do more of this could be a
>>>  periodical vote for the CoolestHacker or whatever.
>>>
>>
>> What if we hack a twitter like thing for GNOME where we can drop a
>> line about what are we doing now or we did this week in GNOME, or
>> maybe just a random thought. At the end of the week or biweekly
>> someone grabs the best lines and sends a GNOME Almost Weekly News.
>> It would work as an informal way of keeping track of what we are doing
>> (in human readable format) and a way to comment on what other cool
>> guys are doing. Pretty much like twitter:
>>
>>  I like the idea. That would be an easy way to keep track of what's
> happening in GNOME at a central place. The main problem I see is to convince
> developers that they actually post their status updates.

Wouldn't that defeat the purpose. If developers don't want to post, forcing
them to do so isn't going to attract more contributors.

Besides, isn't this the point of project/people trackers like CIA and Ohloh?


>
>
> --
> Greetings,
> Sebastian Pölsterl
>
> ___
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>
Natan
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Re: Need Leadership

[Sebastian Pölsterl]

Diego Escalante Urrelo schrieb:

Hey,

On 6/28/08, Thomas H.P. Andersen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

On Fri, Jun 27, 2008 at 6:13 PM, Dave Neary <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
 >

 But this all getting a bit off topic I guess :) I just wanted to point
 out two things that might motivate developers (ego boosts and personal
 profit) and see if there are ways we can help those along. The ego
 boosting is already there. There can be enough hacker energy for weeks
 in a single "Awesome!" One way we could do more of this could be a
 periodical vote for the CoolestHacker or whatever.


What if we hack a twitter like thing for GNOME where we can drop a
line about what are we doing now or we did this week in GNOME, or
maybe just a random thought. At the end of the week or biweekly
someone grabs the best lines and sends a GNOME Almost Weekly News.
It would work as an informal way of keeping track of what we are doing
(in human readable format) and a way to comment on what other cool
guys are doing. Pretty much like twitter:

I like the idea. That would be an easy way to keep track of what's 
happening in GNOME at a central place. The main problem I see is to 
convince developers that they actually post their status updates.


--
Greetings,
Sebastian Pölsterl
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Re: Need Leadership

[Diego Escalante Urrelo]

Hey,

On 6/28/08, Thomas H.P. Andersen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 27, 2008 at 6:13 PM, Dave Neary <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>  >
>
>  But this all getting a bit off topic I guess :) I just wanted to point
>  out two things that might motivate developers (ego boosts and personal
>  profit) and see if there are ways we can help those along. The ego
>  boosting is already there. There can be enough hacker energy for weeks
>  in a single "Awesome!" One way we could do more of this could be a
>  periodical vote for the CoolestHacker or whatever.

What if we hack a twitter like thing for GNOME where we can drop a
line about what are we doing now or we did this week in GNOME, or
maybe just a random thought. At the end of the week or biweekly
someone grabs the best lines and sends a GNOME Almost Weekly News.
It would work as an informal way of keeping track of what we are doing
(in human readable format) and a way to comment on what other cool
guys are doing. Pretty much like twitter:

[monday]
vuntz: ignoring panel bugs
andre: @vuntz for lazy hacker of the week!
diegoe: sending silly ideas to ddl

Yeah, a bit of crack and maybe overoveroverkill, but I thought it
fitted the gwn and public recognition things.
Of course we could use twitter, it would only take to create an
account that follow all the twitter'ing gnome hackers. It starts to
sound a bit more sane, what do you think?

:)
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Re: Need Leadership

[Thomas H.P. Andersen]

On Fri, Jun 27, 2008 at 6:13 PM, Dave Neary <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> Hi ho.

Hi Dave,

Well, let's not rule out that I could be a complete idiot and have
totally misunderstood the process of job screening/interviewing :)
Maybe it's also different from area to area. I don't know. Either way
I appreciate your comments and insights into how you do these things.
Many of the jobs available to me locally are mostly small electronics
companies rather than true software companies. I fear that some of
them won't have much of a clue about open source. In that case some
document stating that I fixed x number of bugs, changed x lines of
code, what kind of applications this was in, etc. might be more
helpful than a link to ohloh.

But this all getting a bit off topic I guess :) I just wanted to point
out two things that might motivate developers (ego boosts and personal
profit) and see if there are ways we can help those along. The ego
boosting is already there. There can be enough hacker energy for weeks
in a single "Awesome!" One way we could do more of this could be a
periodical vote for the CoolestHacker or whatever. The profit part was
to show potential hackers that they will profit too. If we exposed the
personal benefits you get from having contributed more we might be
able to attract e.g. more students. It could be in the form of an auto
generated pdf summary of your contributions or something completely
different. Maybe we don't even really want people with that kind of
motivation around...

- Thomas H.P. Andersen
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Re: Need Leadership

[Diego Escalante Urrelo]

On 6/27/08, Behdad Esfahbod <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On Fri, 2008-06-27 at 12:21 -0500, Diego Escalante Urrelo wrote:
>  >
>  > Yeah, all those sites are there, but you are thinking in
>  > this-century-enabled people. It's not a work only thing also, some
>  > people might be happy to hang it on the wall.
>  > Maybe it's a bit of a corner case, but the two times I had to ask a
>  > visa for guadec I was asked "and don't you have a document that
>  > ackownledges your participation in this?", smiling a lot fixes the
>  > issue, but just wanted to comment it as an example of people that do
>  > prefer to receive old fashion printed certs and docs.
>  >
>  > In the worst case, it's just a sheet of paper, we can do it anyway and
>  > if people prints it, good for them.
>
>
> GNOME Foundation membership card that you can ask to be sent to you on
>  demand?
>

Haha, yeah.
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Re: Need Leadership

[Behdad Esfahbod]

On Fri, 2008-06-27 at 12:21 -0500, Diego Escalante Urrelo wrote:
> 
> Yeah, all those sites are there, but you are thinking in
> this-century-enabled people. It's not a work only thing also, some
> people might be happy to hang it on the wall.
> Maybe it's a bit of a corner case, but the two times I had to ask a
> visa for guadec I was asked "and don't you have a document that
> ackownledges your participation in this?", smiling a lot fixes the
> issue, but just wanted to comment it as an example of people that do
> prefer to receive old fashion printed certs and docs.
> 
> In the worst case, it's just a sheet of paper, we can do it anyway and
> if people prints it, good for them.

GNOME Foundation membership card that you can ask to be sent to you on
demand?

-- 
behdad
http://behdad.org/

"Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little
 Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
-- Benjamin Franklin, 1759

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Re: Need Leadership

[Diego Escalante Urrelo]

On 6/27/08, Andre Klapper <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Hej hej Thomas!,
>
>  Am Freitag, den 27.06.2008, 14:16 +0200 schrieb Thomas H.P. Andersen:
>
> > Sorry, I wasn't being clear. I should have told you my position and
>  > motivation for this. I'm about to start the last year of my master and
>  > will soon start doing job interviews. By "diploma" I meant a nicely
>  > laid out document summarizing my contributions to gnome. I feel that
>  > what I have learned from doing gnome stuff is almost as important as
>  > my degree
>
>
> definitely the same for me.
>
>
>  > and I would like to be able to document that at a job interview.
>
>
> it's all open source, so your contributions are public. you can link to
>  them in your CV. you have statistic pages in gnome bugzilla, you have
>  wikipages (with static links and fake beards *g*), you have ohloh.net
>  and cia.vc, you have mailing list archives, you have google queries.
>  no need for "official-looking documents" if your potential employer only
>  knows a little bit about software projects, from my point of view.
>

Yeah, all those sites are there, but you are thinking in
this-century-enabled people. It's not a work only thing also, some
people might be happy to hang it on the wall.
Maybe it's a bit of a corner case, but the two times I had to ask a
visa for guadec I was asked "and don't you have a document that
ackownledges your participation in this?", smiling a lot fixes the
issue, but just wanted to comment it as an example of people that do
prefer to receive old fashion printed certs and docs.

In the worst case, it's just a sheet of paper, we can do it anyway and
if people prints it, good for them.
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Re: Need Leadership

[Dave Neary]

Hi ho.

Thomas H.P. Andersen wrote:
> I guess maybe the job interviewing culture varies from place to place
> but I don't expect a job application screener / job interviewer to
> actually spend the time to go online and look at all these things.

Funny... that's the first thing I expect people to do, and the first
thing I'll do after an initial vetting of a CV if I'm hiring. If I'm
hiring someone who lists free software development experience on their
CV, I'll go hunting on Google at least, maybe ohloh after.

There's a difference between initial screening (How many years
experience? What skills? Sufficient education?) and a technical
screening where I'll look for quality rather than quantity.

> I can of course write up my contributions myself but it would be sorf
> of like having some workplace on your cv without including a letter of
> recommendation.

Oo-er - is that not normal? :} I don't collect recommendation letters
from former bosses... although I've started requestion recommendations
on LinkedIn from old colleagues.

> All that I can say is that in my world this is something I would like
> to be able to include in a job application. That's all :)

If you're looking for a job where your free software experience is
relevant, I would not only list it, I would put it front & center.

Cheers,
Dave.

-- 
Dave Neary
GNOME Foundation member
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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Re: Need Leadership

[Thomas H.P. Andersen]

> Hej hej Thomas!,

Hej Andre :)

>> and I would like to be able to document that at a job interview.
>
> it's all open source, so your contributions are public. you can link to
> them in your CV. you have statistic pages in gnome bugzilla, you have
> wikipages (with static links and fake beards *g*), you have ohloh.net
> and cia.vc, you have mailing list archives, you have google queries.
> no need for "official-looking documents" if your potential employer only
> knows a little bit about software projects, from my point of view.

he he, yes I should make sure to wear my fake beard at the interviews :)

I guess maybe the job interviewing culture varies from place to place
but I don't expect a job application screener / job interviewer to
actually spend the time to go online and look at all these things.
They are busy people. Maybe if they find me really interesting they
would. But links don't help kick the door open as a brief one-stop
document would. Chances are the interviewer won't even know enough
about open source to understand the information in those links.

I can of course write up my contributions myself but it would be sorf
of like having some workplace on your cv without including a letter of
recommendation.

All that I can say is that in my world this is something I would like
to be able to include in a job application. That's all :)

- Thomas H.P. Andersen
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Re: Need Leadership

[natan yellin]

On Fri, Jun 27, 2008 at 6:06 PM, Marko Anastasov <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote:

> > On Fri, Jun 27, 2008 at 5:03 PM, natan yellin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> >>
> >> On Fri, Jun 27, 2008 at 3:16 PM, Thomas H.P. Andersen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> >
> >> wrote:
> >>>
> >>> > That's a bit of an exaggeration, but there is something to what
> Leslie
> >>> > said.
> >>> > Personally, I felt that in the case of GHOP, the grand prize was more
> >>> > important to most people than the money or the t-shirt.
> >>>
> >>> Well, maybe. I was not part of it. I do remember her saying that some
> >>> students who did not get picked wanted to continue anyway just of the
> >>> t-shirt. But sure. Money counts a lot too.
> >>>
> >>>
> >>> >> Wearing a soc t-shirt gets you recognition from your fellow hackers.
> >>> >> Having a "diploma" from google in your CV gets you recognition from
> a
> >>> >> future employer.
> >>> >
> >>> > It's a bit early to focus on specifics, but don't use the word
> diploma.
> >>> > Something like "First Place 2009 GNOME Design Winner" sounds better
> >>> > even if
> >>> > it's more verbose.
> >>>
> >>> Sorry, I wasn't being clear. I should have told you my position and
> >>> motivation for this. I'm about to start the last year of my master and
> >>> will soon start doing job interviews. By "diploma" I meant a nicely
> >>> laid out document summarizing my contributions to gnome. I feel that
> >>> what I have learned from doing gnome stuff is almost as important as
> >>> my degree and I would like to be able to document that at a job
> >>> interview. Hence the "dimploma". (sorry about that word. I don't know
> >>> what to use instead.)
> >>
> >> I understand. Open source does provide great experience, and an official
> >> document summarizing your contributions and skills is more meaningful
> than a
> >> few sentences on your resume in which you detail your involvement
> yourself.
> >>>
> >>> >> Could we do something like that? A t-shirt for mvp hacker(s) of the
> >>> >> year? Perhaps by vote from foundation members or the like? An
> official
> >>> >> looking pretty printed/printable "diploma" summarizing ones
> >>> >> contribution to gnome?
> >>> >
> >>> > That _does_ sound a bit lame, but perhaps thats just me. I think a
> >>> > better
> >>> > approach would be to have an awards ceremony at GUADEC (formal events
> >>> > make a
> >>> > much better impression), pay for the winner's flight, and give them a
> >>> > cash
> >>> > prize, no matter how small and insignificant it is. It's not
> necessary,
> >>> > but
> >>> > giving them a nice and shiny trophy like Apple does would also be a
> >>> > good
> >>> > idea.
> >>>
> >>> That's great for getting credit among your fellow hackers. That was
> >>> what I thought the t-shirt would accomplish. Either way is good. One
> >>> is just more expensive and I think money is a very limited resource
> >>> for such a thing.
> >>
> >> While they both carry _some_ meaning, even just a paid ticket to GUADEC
> is
> >> a lot more meaningful then a t-shirt recieved in the mail.
> >> The ticket implies that they've done extremely good work, and not only
> do
> >> they deserve recognition for that, but they get to attend GUADEC so that
> >> they can continue to contribute more productively in the future.
> >>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>> It's all about motivating developers to do more stuff. I personally
> >>> care about getting a pad on the back for doing good work from fellow
> >>> hackers and I also care about how I can do stuff to help me get a good
> >>> job. Whatever means gets us there is fine :)
> >>
> >> As you said, there are two issues here:
> >> 1. People want something that they can show when they get hired.
> >> 2. People appreciate recognition.
>
> Why do you call them "issues"? You can always tell people what you've
> been working on or contributing to. Recognition is relative, but it is
> never lacking. Depends on what you expect.
>
Sorry. It was a bad choice of words.

>
> Anyway, I disagree a bit here. First of all, the idea that some T-shirt is
> the
> most important motive so that a young programmer can walk around with
> it and get recognition sounds a bit silly to me. Most people on my
> university
> don't even have a clue what GNOME is, and generally I don't talk about
> the things that I do in the GNOME world in my free time to anybody but
> one or two people.
>
In most of the places that I used the term t-shirt, I was referring to
recognition in general. As I said, if you want to give an award it has to be
something more serious.

>
> A formal document testifying your GNOME contributions is again, let's say
> unnecessary IMO. If your potential employer cannot realize what it means
> when somebody comes with a couple of open source project names and
> brief explanations behind him then no other paper would matter more and
> you should probably look elsewhere for the job.
>
> In the end you're doing it for your own pleasure, at the same time aware
> of the long term

Re: Need Leadership

[Marko Anastasov]

> On Fri, Jun 27, 2008 at 5:03 PM, natan yellin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>>
>> On Fri, Jun 27, 2008 at 3:16 PM, Thomas H.P. Andersen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>> wrote:
>>>
>>> > That's a bit of an exaggeration, but there is something to what Leslie
>>> > said.
>>> > Personally, I felt that in the case of GHOP, the grand prize was more
>>> > important to most people than the money or the t-shirt.
>>>
>>> Well, maybe. I was not part of it. I do remember her saying that some
>>> students who did not get picked wanted to continue anyway just of the
>>> t-shirt. But sure. Money counts a lot too.
>>>
>>>
>>> >> Wearing a soc t-shirt gets you recognition from your fellow hackers.
>>> >> Having a "diploma" from google in your CV gets you recognition from a
>>> >> future employer.
>>> >
>>> > It's a bit early to focus on specifics, but don't use the word diploma.
>>> > Something like "First Place 2009 GNOME Design Winner" sounds better
>>> > even if
>>> > it's more verbose.
>>>
>>> Sorry, I wasn't being clear. I should have told you my position and
>>> motivation for this. I'm about to start the last year of my master and
>>> will soon start doing job interviews. By "diploma" I meant a nicely
>>> laid out document summarizing my contributions to gnome. I feel that
>>> what I have learned from doing gnome stuff is almost as important as
>>> my degree and I would like to be able to document that at a job
>>> interview. Hence the "dimploma". (sorry about that word. I don't know
>>> what to use instead.)
>>
>> I understand. Open source does provide great experience, and an official
>> document summarizing your contributions and skills is more meaningful than a
>> few sentences on your resume in which you detail your involvement yourself.
>>>
>>> >> Could we do something like that? A t-shirt for mvp hacker(s) of the
>>> >> year? Perhaps by vote from foundation members or the like? An official
>>> >> looking pretty printed/printable "diploma" summarizing ones
>>> >> contribution to gnome?
>>> >
>>> > That _does_ sound a bit lame, but perhaps thats just me. I think a
>>> > better
>>> > approach would be to have an awards ceremony at GUADEC (formal events
>>> > make a
>>> > much better impression), pay for the winner's flight, and give them a
>>> > cash
>>> > prize, no matter how small and insignificant it is. It's not necessary,
>>> > but
>>> > giving them a nice and shiny trophy like Apple does would also be a
>>> > good
>>> > idea.
>>>
>>> That's great for getting credit among your fellow hackers. That was
>>> what I thought the t-shirt would accomplish. Either way is good. One
>>> is just more expensive and I think money is a very limited resource
>>> for such a thing.
>>
>> While they both carry _some_ meaning, even just a paid ticket to GUADEC is
>> a lot more meaningful then a t-shirt recieved in the mail.
>> The ticket implies that they've done extremely good work, and not only do
>> they deserve recognition for that, but they get to attend GUADEC so that
>> they can continue to contribute more productively in the future.
>>
>>>
>>>
>>> It's all about motivating developers to do more stuff. I personally
>>> care about getting a pad on the back for doing good work from fellow
>>> hackers and I also care about how I can do stuff to help me get a good
>>> job. Whatever means gets us there is fine :)
>>
>> As you said, there are two issues here:
>> 1. People want something that they can show when they get hired.
>> 2. People appreciate recognition.

Why do you call them "issues"? You can always tell people what you've
been working on or contributing to. Recognition is relative, but it is
never lacking. Depends on what you expect.

Anyway, I disagree a bit here. First of all, the idea that some T-shirt is the
most important motive so that a young programmer can walk around with
it and get recognition sounds a bit silly to me. Most people on my university
don't even have a clue what GNOME is, and generally I don't talk about
the things that I do in the GNOME world in my free time to anybody but
one or two people.

A formal document testifying your GNOME contributions is again, let's say
unnecessary IMO. If your potential employer cannot realize what it means
when somebody comes with a couple of open source project names and
brief explanations behind him then no other paper would matter more and
you should probably look elsewhere for the job.

In the end you're doing it for your own pleasure, at the same time aware
of the long term (in)direct professional benefits, right?

The prizes and ceremonies that you mention seem to imply that new
contributors would prefer to do some GNOME stuff over summer, then
later look for a job and more or less disappear. That's perfectly ok, but
probably not the main kind of a manforce that the project primarily needs.

Getting a GNOME-related job after a while is an awesome form of
"recognition" though, but it's usually not available for people
outside EU and US.

Regarding sponsorship for GUA

Re: Need Leadership

[Andre Klapper]

Hej hej Thomas!,

Am Freitag, den 27.06.2008, 14:16 +0200 schrieb Thomas H.P. Andersen:
> Sorry, I wasn't being clear. I should have told you my position and
> motivation for this. I'm about to start the last year of my master and
> will soon start doing job interviews. By "diploma" I meant a nicely
> laid out document summarizing my contributions to gnome. I feel that
> what I have learned from doing gnome stuff is almost as important as
> my degree 

definitely the same for me.

> and I would like to be able to document that at a job interview.

it's all open source, so your contributions are public. you can link to
them in your CV. you have statistic pages in gnome bugzilla, you have
wikipages (with static links and fake beards *g*), you have ohloh.net
and cia.vc, you have mailing list archives, you have google queries.
no need for "official-looking documents" if your potential employer only
knows a little bit about software projects, from my point of view.

andre
-- 
 mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] | failed
 http://www.iomc.de/  | http://blogs.gnome.org/aklapper

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Re: Need Leadership

[natan yellin]

On Fri, Jun 27, 2008 at 5:03 PM, natan yellin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> On Fri, Jun 27, 2008 at 3:16 PM, Thomas H.P. Andersen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> wrote:
>
>> > That's a bit of an exaggeration, but there is something to what Leslie
>> said.
>> > Personally, I felt that in the case of GHOP, the grand prize was more
>> > important to most people than the money or the t-shirt.
>>
>> Well, maybe. I was not part of it. I do remember her saying that some
>> students who did not get picked wanted to continue anyway just of the
>> t-shirt. But sure. Money counts a lot too.
>>
>>
>> >> Wearing a soc t-shirt gets you recognition from your fellow hackers.
>> >> Having a "diploma" from google in your CV gets you recognition from a
>> >> future employer.
>> >
>> > It's a bit early to focus on specifics, but don't use the word diploma.
>> > Something like "First Place 2009 GNOME Design Winner" sounds better even
>> if
>> > it's more verbose.
>>
>> Sorry, I wasn't being clear. I should have told you my position and
>> motivation for this. I'm about to start the last year of my master and
>> will soon start doing job interviews. By "diploma" I meant a nicely
>> laid out document summarizing my contributions to gnome. I feel that
>> what I have learned from doing gnome stuff is almost as important as
>> my degree and I would like to be able to document that at a job
>> interview. Hence the "dimploma". (sorry about that word. I don't know
>> what to use instead.)
>>
> I understand. Open source does provide great experience, and an official
> document summarizing your contributions and skills is more meaningful than a
> few sentences on your resume in which you detail your involvement yourself.
>
>>
>> >> Could we do something like that? A t-shirt for mvp hacker(s) of the
>> >> year? Perhaps by vote from foundation members or the like? An official
>> >> looking pretty printed/printable "diploma" summarizing ones
>> >> contribution to gnome?
>> >
>> > That _does_ sound a bit lame, but perhaps thats just me. I think a
>> better
>> > approach would be to have an awards ceremony at GUADEC (formal events
>> make a
>> > much better impression), pay for the winner's flight, and give them a
>> cash
>> > prize, no matter how small and insignificant it is. It's not necessary,
>> but
>> > giving them a nice and shiny trophy like Apple does would also be a good
>> > idea.
>>
>> That's great for getting credit among your fellow hackers. That was
>> what I thought the t-shirt would accomplish. Either way is good. One
>> is just more expensive and I think money is a very limited resource
>> for such a thing.
>>
> While they both carry _some_ meaning, even just a paid ticket to GUADEC is
> a lot more meaningful then a t-shirt recieved in the mail.
> The ticket implies that they've done extremely good work, and not only do
> they deserve recognition for that, but they get to attend GUADEC so that
> they can continue to contribute more productively in the future.
>
>
>>
>> It's all about motivating developers to do more stuff. I personally
>> care about getting a pad on the back for doing good work from fellow
>> hackers and I also care about how I can do stuff to help me get a good
>> job. Whatever means gets us there is fine :)
>
> As you said, there are two issues here:
> 1. People want something that they can show when they get hired.
> 2. People appreciate recognition.
>
>>
>> - Thomas H.P. Andersen
>>
> Natan
>
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Re: Need Leadership

[natan yellin]

On Fri, Jun 27, 2008 at 3:48 PM, Who <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> 2008/6/27 natan yellin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
> > One thing I'd like to add on to my last reply:
> >
> > On Fri, Jun 27, 2008 at 2:56 PM, natan yellin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> >>
> >> On Fri, Jun 27, 2008 at 2:29 PM, Thomas H.P. Andersen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> >
> >> wrote:
> >>>
> >>> On Wed, Jun 25, 2008 at 2:00 PM, Rodrigo Moya <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> >>> wrote:
> >>> > On Tue, 2008-06-24 at 12:27 +0300, natan yellin wrote:
> >>> >> 1. Host an annual developer awards contest. Apple does it, and
> there's
> >>> >> really no reason why we shouldn't as well. The system would have to
> be
> >>> >> adapted a bit, but it _is_ doable. Like it or not, shiny prizes and
> >>> >> recognition help attract developers.
> >>> >>
> >>> > this sounds good to me, if the Foundation has money, we could have
> >>> > every
> >>> > year a contest for the "coolest GNOME project of the year". GSoC gets
> >>> > us
> >>> > new developers mainly because of the prizes, so it is a good idea I
> >>> > think to have something similar
> >>>
> >>> I don't think money has to be involved at all. Recognition is all that
> >>> matters. I remember seeing a talk by Leslie Hawthorn where she said
> >>> that what the students in google's soc primarily cared about was the
> >>> t-shirt. The money was just a nice extra.
> >
> > The money is also a way for people to justify their effort. Even if they
> > care about the t-shirt more, they wont spend their time trying to get it.
>
> I think for a lot of people the money is not just a way to justify
> their effort, but to make the proposition feasible - if you can get a
> paid software internship then even if you really love GNOME, being
> short on cash makes the decision for you.
>
Sorry, I should have explained better. My point was that the some of the
people you mention below (who want to spend the summer hacking on GNOME)
wouldn't be able to do it if it wasn't for the money. Even if the shirt is
the most important thing, it's hard to justify- or as you mentioned,
finance- a decision like that if there's no cash at all involved.

>
> You probably wouldn't get involved with something like GSOC unles you
> 'cared more about the tshirt' - students can likely get more money
> elsewhere - what I think is important is that regardless of how much
> they care about GNOME, want to hack on it, etc, it just isn't
> financially possible to spend your summer _not_ earning money, and if
> you're good with software, you'll likely end up with a software
> internship, and consequently much less energy/time to spend on GNOME.
>

> Jonathan
>
-Natan
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Re: Need Leadership

[Who]

2008/6/27 natan yellin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
> One thing I'd like to add on to my last reply:
>
> On Fri, Jun 27, 2008 at 2:56 PM, natan yellin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>>
>> On Fri, Jun 27, 2008 at 2:29 PM, Thomas H.P. Andersen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>> wrote:
>>>
>>> On Wed, Jun 25, 2008 at 2:00 PM, Rodrigo Moya <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>>> wrote:
>>> > On Tue, 2008-06-24 at 12:27 +0300, natan yellin wrote:
>>> >> 1. Host an annual developer awards contest. Apple does it, and there's
>>> >> really no reason why we shouldn't as well. The system would have to be
>>> >> adapted a bit, but it _is_ doable. Like it or not, shiny prizes and
>>> >> recognition help attract developers.
>>> >>
>>> > this sounds good to me, if the Foundation has money, we could have
>>> > every
>>> > year a contest for the "coolest GNOME project of the year". GSoC gets
>>> > us
>>> > new developers mainly because of the prizes, so it is a good idea I
>>> > think to have something similar
>>>
>>> I don't think money has to be involved at all. Recognition is all that
>>> matters. I remember seeing a talk by Leslie Hawthorn where she said
>>> that what the students in google's soc primarily cared about was the
>>> t-shirt. The money was just a nice extra.
>
> The money is also a way for people to justify their effort. Even if they
> care about the t-shirt more, they wont spend their time trying to get it.

I think for a lot of people the money is not just a way to justify
their effort, but to make the proposition feasible - if you can get a
paid software internship then even if you really love GNOME, being
short on cash makes the decision for you.

You probably wouldn't get involved with something like GSOC unless you
'cared more about the tshirt' - students can likely get more money
elsewhere - what I think is important is that regardless of how much
they care about GNOME, want to hack on it, etc, it just isn't
financially possible to spend your summer _not_ earning money, and if
you're good with software, you'll likely end up with a software
internship, and consequently much less energy/time to spend on GNOME.

Jonathan
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Re: Need Leadership

[Thomas H.P. Andersen]

> That's a bit of an exaggeration, but there is something to what Leslie said.
> Personally, I felt that in the case of GHOP, the grand prize was more
> important to most people than the money or the t-shirt.

Well, maybe. I was not part of it. I do remember her saying that some
students who did not get picked wanted to continue anyway just of the
t-shirt. But sure. Money counts a lot too.

>> Wearing a soc t-shirt gets you recognition from your fellow hackers.
>> Having a "diploma" from google in your CV gets you recognition from a
>> future employer.
>
> It's a bit early to focus on specifics, but don't use the word diploma.
> Something like "First Place 2009 GNOME Design Winner" sounds better even if
> it's more verbose.

Sorry, I wasn't being clear. I should have told you my position and
motivation for this. I'm about to start the last year of my master and
will soon start doing job interviews. By "diploma" I meant a nicely
laid out document summarizing my contributions to gnome. I feel that
what I have learned from doing gnome stuff is almost as important as
my degree and I would like to be able to document that at a job
interview. Hence the "dimploma". (sorry about that word. I don't know
what to use instead.)

>> Could we do something like that? A t-shirt for mvp hacker(s) of the
>> year? Perhaps by vote from foundation members or the like? An official
>> looking pretty printed/printable "diploma" summarizing ones
>> contribution to gnome?
>
> That _does_ sound a bit lame, but perhaps thats just me. I think a better
> approach would be to have an awards ceremony at GUADEC (formal events make a
> much better impression), pay for the winner's flight, and give them a cash
> prize, no matter how small and insignificant it is. It's not necessary, but
> giving them a nice and shiny trophy like Apple does would also be a good
> idea.

That's great for getting credit among your fellow hackers. That was
what I thought the t-shirt would accomplish. Either way is good. One
is just more expensive and I think money is a very limited resource
for such a thing.

It's all about motivating developers to do more stuff. I personally
care about getting a pad on the back for doing good work from fellow
hackers and I also care about how I can do stuff to help me get a good
job. Whatever means gets us there is fine :)

- Thomas H.P. Andersen
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Re: Need Leadership

[natan yellin]

One thing I'd like to add on to my last reply:

On Fri, Jun 27, 2008 at 2:56 PM, natan yellin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> On Fri, Jun 27, 2008 at 2:29 PM, Thomas H.P. Andersen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> wrote:
>
>> On Wed, Jun 25, 2008 at 2:00 PM, Rodrigo Moya <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>> wrote:
>> > On Tue, 2008-06-24 at 12:27 +0300, natan yellin wrote:
>> >> 1. Host an annual developer awards contest. Apple does it, and there's
>> >> really no reason why we shouldn't as well. The system would have to be
>> >> adapted a bit, but it _is_ doable. Like it or not, shiny prizes and
>> >> recognition help attract developers.
>> >>
>> > this sounds good to me, if the Foundation has money, we could have every
>> > year a contest for the "coolest GNOME project of the year". GSoC gets us
>> > new developers mainly because of the prizes, so it is a good idea I
>> > think to have something similar
>>
>
>> I don't think money has to be involved at all. Recognition is all that
>> matters. I remember seeing a talk by Leslie Hawthorn where she said
>> that what the students in google's soc primarily cared about was the
>> t-shirt. The money was just a nice extra.
>
> The money is also a way for people to justify their effort. Even if they
care about the t-shirt more, they wont spend their time trying to get it.

> That's a bit of an exaggeration, but there is something to what Leslie
> said. Personally, I felt that in the case of GHOP, the grand prize was more
> important to most people than the money or the t-shirt.
>
>>
>> Wearing a soc t-shirt gets you recognition from your fellow hackers.
>> Having a "diploma" from google in your CV gets you recognition from a
>> future employer.
>>
> It's a bit early to focus on specifics, but don't use the word diploma.
> Something like "First Place 2009 GNOME Design Winner" sounds better even if
> it's more verbose.
>
>>
>> Could we do something like that? A t-shirt for mvp hacker(s) of the
>> year? Perhaps by vote from foundation members or the like? An official
>> looking pretty printed/printable "diploma" summarizing ones
>> contribution to gnome?
>
> That _does_ sound a bit lame, but perhaps thats just me. I think a better
> approach would be to have an awards ceremony at GUADEC (formal events make a
> much better impression), pay for the winner's flight, and give them a cash
> prize, no matter how small and insignificant it is. It's not necessary, but
> giving them a nice and shiny trophy like Apple does would also be a good
> idea.
>
> Another advantage of the above ceremony would simply be the fact that new
> hackers who've shown potential would attend GUADEC, which they most likely
> wouldn't do otherwise.
>
>
>>
>> It might help bring in more contributors if we can convince e.g.
>> students that contributing is a good future career move. It's a nice
>> way of showing your skills, experience and also knowledge of tools
>> like vcs, bug-trackers, etc.
>>
>> If people think it is a good idea I'd love to help get it set up.
>>
>> - Thomas H.P. Andersen
>>
> -Natan
>
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Re: Need Leadership

[natan yellin]

On Fri, Jun 27, 2008 at 2:29 PM, Thomas H.P. Andersen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote:

> On Wed, Jun 25, 2008 at 2:00 PM, Rodrigo Moya <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> wrote:
> > On Tue, 2008-06-24 at 12:27 +0300, natan yellin wrote:
> >> 1. Host an annual developer awards contest. Apple does it, and there's
> >> really no reason why we shouldn't as well. The system would have to be
> >> adapted a bit, but it _is_ doable. Like it or not, shiny prizes and
> >> recognition help attract developers.
> >>
> > this sounds good to me, if the Foundation has money, we could have every
> > year a contest for the "coolest GNOME project of the year". GSoC gets us
> > new developers mainly because of the prizes, so it is a good idea I
> > think to have something similar
>

> I don't think money has to be involved at all. Recognition is all that
> matters. I remember seeing a talk by Leslie Hawthorn where she said
> that what the students in google's soc primarily cared about was the
> t-shirt. The money was just a nice extra.

That's a bit of an exaggeration, but there is something to what Leslie said.
Personally, I felt that in the case of GHOP, the grand prize was more
important to most people than the money or the t-shirt.

>
> Wearing a soc t-shirt gets you recognition from your fellow hackers.
> Having a "diploma" from google in your CV gets you recognition from a
> future employer.
>
It's a bit early to focus on specifics, but don't use the word diploma.
Something like "First Place 2009 GNOME Design Winner" sounds better even if
it's more verbose.

>
> Could we do something like that? A t-shirt for mvp hacker(s) of the
> year? Perhaps by vote from foundation members or the like? An official
> looking pretty printed/printable "diploma" summarizing ones
> contribution to gnome?

That _does_ sound a bit lame, but perhaps thats just me. I think a better
approach would be to have an awards ceremony at GUADEC (formal events make a
much better impression), pay for the winner's flight, and give them a cash
prize, no matter how small and insignificant it is. It's not necessary, but
giving them a nice and shiny trophy like Apple does would also be a good
idea.

Another advantage of the above ceremony would simply be the fact that new
hackers who've shown potential would attend GUADEC, which they most likely
wouldn't do otherwise.


>
> It might help bring in more contributors if we can convince e.g.
> students that contributing is a good future career move. It's a nice
> way of showing your skills, experience and also knowledge of tools
> like vcs, bug-trackers, etc.
>
> If people think it is a good idea I'd love to help get it set up.
>
> - Thomas H.P. Andersen
>
-Natan
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Re: Need Leadership

[Thomas H.P. Andersen]

On Wed, Jun 25, 2008 at 2:00 PM, Rodrigo Moya <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On Tue, 2008-06-24 at 12:27 +0300, natan yellin wrote:
>> 1. Host an annual developer awards contest. Apple does it, and there's
>> really no reason why we shouldn't as well. The system would have to be
>> adapted a bit, but it _is_ doable. Like it or not, shiny prizes and
>> recognition help attract developers.
>>
> this sounds good to me, if the Foundation has money, we could have every
> year a contest for the "coolest GNOME project of the year". GSoC gets us
> new developers mainly because of the prizes, so it is a good idea I
> think to have something similar

I don't think money has to be involved at all. Recognition is all that
matters. I remember seeing a talk by Leslie Hawthorn where she said
that what the students in google's soc primarily cared about was the
t-shirt. The money was just a nice extra.

Wearing a soc t-shirt gets you recognition from your fellow hackers.
Having a "diploma" from google in your CV gets you recognition from a
future employer.

Could we do something like that? A t-shirt for mvp hacker(s) of the
year? Perhaps by vote from foundation members or the like? An official
looking pretty printed/printable "diploma" summarizing ones
contribution to gnome?

It might help bring in more contributors if we can convince e.g.
students that contributing is a good future career move. It's a nice
way of showing your skills, experience and also knowledge of tools
like vcs, bug-trackers, etc.

If people think it is a good idea I'd love to help get it set up.

- Thomas H.P. Andersen
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Re: Need Leadership

[Rodrigo Moya]

On Tue, 2008-06-24 at 12:27 +0300, natan yellin wrote:
> 1. Host an annual developer awards contest. Apple does it, and there's
> really no reason why we shouldn't as well. The system would have to be
> adapted a bit, but it _is_ doable. Like it or not, shiny prizes and
> recognition help attract developers.
> 
this sounds good to me, if the Foundation has money, we could have every
year a contest for the "coolest GNOME project of the year". GSoC gets us
new developers mainly because of the prizes, so it is a good idea I
think to have something similar
-- 
Rodrigo Moya <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>

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Re: Need Leadership

[natan yellin]

On Mon, Jun 23, 2008 at 11:54 PM, Brian Cameron <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote:

>
> Jason:
>
>  We need to tap in to the wave of energy generated by the The Thread on
>> Planet Gnome. Already, it's apparent that the fervor that surrounded it
>> has
>> started to dwindle. A ton of interesting ideas were thrown out and lot of
>> belly-aching about no one taking responsibility for making it happen was
>> heard.
>>
>
> That is not quite true.  There is a lot going on to make the GNOME
> Developer Platform more rich and stable, making GNOME a richer
> development platform for third-party ISV's.  As GNOME slowly develops
> more and more interest from third-party ISV's (such as Adobe and Real)
> the platform becomes more usable to a wider audience.
>
> Some examples currently underway include gail merging into GTK+,
> accessibility moving away from ORBit2 and towards D-Bus, gvfs replacing
> gnome-vfs, and so on.  This is in relation to Project Ridley [1].
>
> So, there is a lot of digging in the trenches to prepare GNOME for
> taking things to the next level, I think.
>
>  It's clear from The Thread that we need to "Get Our House In Order".
>> There's
>> nearly universal agreement that Gnome lacks leadership in the sense that
>> there's someone that sets release goals.
>>
>> In my opinion, whatever "The Next-Gen Gnome" is, it isn't going to happen
>> until we really, really have a deep maintenance cycle going on here. That
>> means fixing a Handful of Giant Warts on our maintenance process:
>>
>
> In addition to having a richer developer platform, it is probably
> necessary for GNOME to get some sort of a face-lift in order to warrant
> next generation attention.  This probably would require some addition of
> needed functionality, and some theming/visual elements.  Compiz,
> Clutter, and/or pigment could be a part of this.  Work seems to be
> fairly active in these areas.
>
>  1. DVCS needs to happen; now. It's time. The number of people using a DVCS
>> frontend to circumvent the insanity of SVN continues to grow. In that
>> vein,
>> we need to a) debate the One True DVCS for Gnome, b) delinate the work
>> that
>> needs to be done to get there and set a timeframe, and c) find the man
>> power
>> to do it.
>>
>
> This would have little impact on end-users, I think.
>
>  2. The Giant Rift in the Gnome community over Mono has to end. I hate Mono
>> as much as the next guy but it's quite apparent now that some really cool
>> stuff with financial backing from Big Linux Distributor is not going away:
>> Gnome Main Menu, Banshee, F-Spot, Beagle, Tomboy, etc. We have to get rid
>> of
>> the rift and bring the two diverging communities back together. Whatever
>> damage that might incur in the minds of the Slashdot crowd has already
>> been
>> done--Gnome is perceived (rightly or wrongly) to be largley 'infested with
>> Mono' in the minds of our critics. We cannot capitulate on this to appease
>> a
>> vocal minority of users that detest Mono. It's obvious it's not going away
>> and, with a trivial amount of work, we can mend the rift by including the
>> afore-mentioned mondules in our official releases. Let's just do it and
>> move
>> on with our lives.
>>
>
> Solaris doesn't distribute with Mono, but I wouldn't say anybody at Sun
> detests Mono.  Mono is great!  Aside from causing some distros to have
> slightly different applications (e.g. Beagle versus MetaTracker), I
> do not think whether Mono is used on a given distro causes end-users
> much grief.
>
> In some ways, I think the fact that distros differentiate themselves a
> bit is probably a good thing.  It gives people some choices to consider
> when they pick a distro.
>
>  3. Marketing to developers must get ramped up; we agree that we need a new
>> generation of awesome developers to bring new ideas and blood in to our
>> process. A number of our Gnome modules are in "barely maintained" mode.
>> With
>> new blood, we can reinvigorate 2.x while looking to the future. And I've
>> volunteer for this one in the form of 15 minute screen casts. However, it
>> needs web hosting space. And that needs Gnome resources. What do we have
>> to
>> do to make this hosting happen? What else can we do to get more
>> developers?
>>
>
> The GNOME project has a marketing-list, and you are right that there does
> not seem to be enough volunteers or energy to do a lot of exciting
> things.  If you, or anybody has an interest, I'd get involved.

This problem isn't really specific to GNOME. Unlike Apple's
ADCand Microsoft's
MSDN , there's no "one stop"
location that developers can visit to start getting involved with Linux
development. The necessary information _is_ out there, but it's spread
across the wikis of a hundred distributions, computer languages, frameworks,
and other projects. In addition to centralizing that knowledge into a distro
and toolkit independent location (yes, the latter is probably not happeni

Re: Discussions on Pgo was: Re: Need Leadership

[Sriram Ramkrishna]

On Mon, Jun 23, 2008 at 09:24:48PM +0200, Anders Feder wrote:
> I seem to remember a time when there was an actual journalistic team
> specifically editting and publishing summaries of what had been posted
> within the community in the past week/month. What happened to that
> effort? I suppose the volunteer editor(s) became occupied elsewhere or
> something?

That was me.  I still get the cvs summaries and what not.  I suppose
I could be convinced to do them again.  GNOME Journal was what it
replaced, but the team has been really busy with real life stuff
and of course I haven't stepped in do to work/school/home.

That said, Shaun McCance has been working on something like the summaries
but without the human editorial bent that I was doing.  It's just
pure statistics.

If people are interested, I can do them and have them show up
in GNOME News or something.  I rather have one other person to
volunteer so that we can trade off.

sri
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Re: Need Leadership

[Jason D. Clinton]

On Mon, Jun 23, 2008 at 3:54 PM, Brian Cameron <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote:

> next generation attention.  This probably would require some addition of
>
...

> This would have little impact on end-users, I think.

...

> do not think whether Mono is used on a given distro causes end-users

...

> The GNOME project has a marketing-list, and you are right that there does
> not seem to be enough volunteers or energy to do a lot of exciting
> things.  If you, or anybody has an interest, I'd get involved.
>
> I think its good to discuss what sort of features we should consider in
> taking GNOME to the next generation, so I appreciate your suggestions.

...

You read my email entirely in the wrong context. Please read the response
that I sent to Havoc in this thread on Saturday.

In the words of our collective competitor: "Developers! Developers!
Developers!"
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Re: Need Leadership

[Brian Cameron]

Jason:


We need to tap in to the wave of energy generated by the The Thread on
Planet Gnome. Already, it's apparent that the fervor that surrounded it has
started to dwindle. A ton of interesting ideas were thrown out and lot of
belly-aching about no one taking responsibility for making it happen was
heard.


That is not quite true.  There is a lot going on to make the GNOME
Developer Platform more rich and stable, making GNOME a richer
development platform for third-party ISV's.  As GNOME slowly develops
more and more interest from third-party ISV's (such as Adobe and Real)
the platform becomes more usable to a wider audience.

Some examples currently underway include gail merging into GTK+,
accessibility moving away from ORBit2 and towards D-Bus, gvfs replacing
gnome-vfs, and so on.  This is in relation to Project Ridley [1].

So, there is a lot of digging in the trenches to prepare GNOME for
taking things to the next level, I think.


It's clear from The Thread that we need to "Get Our House In Order". There's
nearly universal agreement that Gnome lacks leadership in the sense that
there's someone that sets release goals.

In my opinion, whatever "The Next-Gen Gnome" is, it isn't going to happen
until we really, really have a deep maintenance cycle going on here. That
means fixing a Handful of Giant Warts on our maintenance process:


In addition to having a richer developer platform, it is probably
necessary for GNOME to get some sort of a face-lift in order to warrant
next generation attention.  This probably would require some addition of
needed functionality, and some theming/visual elements.  Compiz,
Clutter, and/or pigment could be a part of this.  Work seems to be
fairly active in these areas.


1. DVCS needs to happen; now. It's time. The number of people using a DVCS
frontend to circumvent the insanity of SVN continues to grow. In that vein,
we need to a) debate the One True DVCS for Gnome, b) delinate the work that
needs to be done to get there and set a timeframe, and c) find the man power
to do it.


This would have little impact on end-users, I think.


2. The Giant Rift in the Gnome community over Mono has to end. I hate Mono
as much as the next guy but it's quite apparent now that some really cool
stuff with financial backing from Big Linux Distributor is not going away:
Gnome Main Menu, Banshee, F-Spot, Beagle, Tomboy, etc. We have to get rid of
the rift and bring the two diverging communities back together. Whatever
damage that might incur in the minds of the Slashdot crowd has already been
done--Gnome is perceived (rightly or wrongly) to be largley 'infested with
Mono' in the minds of our critics. We cannot capitulate on this to appease a
vocal minority of users that detest Mono. It's obvious it's not going away
and, with a trivial amount of work, we can mend the rift by including the
afore-mentioned mondules in our official releases. Let's just do it and move
on with our lives.


Solaris doesn't distribute with Mono, but I wouldn't say anybody at Sun
detests Mono.  Mono is great!  Aside from causing some distros to have
slightly different applications (e.g. Beagle versus MetaTracker), I
do not think whether Mono is used on a given distro causes end-users
much grief.

In some ways, I think the fact that distros differentiate themselves a
bit is probably a good thing.  It gives people some choices to consider
when they pick a distro.


3. Marketing to developers must get ramped up; we agree that we need a new
generation of awesome developers to bring new ideas and blood in to our
process. A number of our Gnome modules are in "barely maintained" mode. With
new blood, we can reinvigorate 2.x while looking to the future. And I've
volunteer for this one in the form of 15 minute screen casts. However, it
needs web hosting space. And that needs Gnome resources. What do we have to
do to make this hosting happen? What else can we do to get more developers?


The GNOME project has a marketing-list, and you are right that there 
does not seem to be enough volunteers or energy to do a lot of exciting

things.  If you, or anybody has an interest, I'd get involved.

I think its good to discuss what sort of features we should consider in
taking GNOME to the next generation, so I appreciate your suggestions.

Brian

[1] http://live.gnome.org/ProjectRidley
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Re: Discussions on Pgo was: Re: Need Leadership

[natan yellin]

On Mon, Jun 23, 2008 at 10:24 PM, Anders Feder <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote:

> I seem to remember a time when there was an actual journalistic team
> specifically editting and publishing summaries of what had been posted
> within the community in the past week/month. What happened to that
> effort? I suppose the volunteer editor(s) became occupied elsewhere or
> something?
>
I haven't been around for long enough to "remember" that.

If the planet at least tracked tracebacks itself, the manual summaries you
mentioned would be able to scale a whole lot better.

>
> man, 23 06 2008 kl. 22:03 +0300, skrev natan yellin:
> >
> >
> > On Mon, Jun 23, 2008 at 9:26 PM, Kalle Vahlman
> > <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > 2008/6/23 BJörn Lindqvist <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
> > > Pgo is good for getting to know the daily lives of gnome
> > hackers and
> > > stuff. But it shouldn't act as a general debating board.
> > That's what
> > > mailing lists are for.
> >
> >
> > I'd like to state my exactly opposite feeling, pgo is the
> > correct
> > medium for opinions and analysis of current state of
> > "decadence".
> > There one can go on about dreams and stuff for all eternity
> > for all I
> > care.
> > Assuming that your blog is in the feed, then yes.
> >
> > The only real solution that I'd be happy with would be a "smart
> > planet" that tracks tracebacks to posts in the feed and includes the
> > popular ones even if _those_ blogs aren't in the feed themselves.
> > Still, for now, the best we can do is have pgo bloggers write roundups
> > like these.
> >
> > /rant
> >
> > But I'd rather see things condensed to concrete suggestions of
> > actions
> > before hitting the mailing lists to ensure some real meat for
> > discussions (just like Jason did), not just stating the
> > opinion which,
> > while probably interesting, doesn't really help advancing the
> > "cause".
> >
> > --
> > Kalle Vahlman, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> > Powered by http://movial.fi
> > Interesting stuff at http://syslog.movial.fi
> >
> > ___
> > desktop-devel-list mailing list
> > desktop-devel-list@gnome.org
> > http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
> >
> > ___
> > desktop-devel-list mailing list
> > desktop-devel-list@gnome.org
> > http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
> --
> Anders Feder <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>
> Natan
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Re: Discussions on Pgo was: Re: Need Leadership

[Anders Feder]

I seem to remember a time when there was an actual journalistic team
specifically editting and publishing summaries of what had been posted
within the community in the past week/month. What happened to that
effort? I suppose the volunteer editor(s) became occupied elsewhere or
something?

man, 23 06 2008 kl. 22:03 +0300, skrev natan yellin:
> 
> 
> On Mon, Jun 23, 2008 at 9:26 PM, Kalle Vahlman
> <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> 2008/6/23 BJörn Lindqvist <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
> > Pgo is good for getting to know the daily lives of gnome
> hackers and
> > stuff. But it shouldn't act as a general debating board.
> That's what
> > mailing lists are for.
> 
> 
> I'd like to state my exactly opposite feeling, pgo is the
> correct
> medium for opinions and analysis of current state of
> "decadence".
> There one can go on about dreams and stuff for all eternity
> for all I
> care.
> Assuming that your blog is in the feed, then yes.
> 
> The only real solution that I'd be happy with would be a "smart
> planet" that tracks tracebacks to posts in the feed and includes the
> popular ones even if _those_ blogs aren't in the feed themselves.
> Still, for now, the best we can do is have pgo bloggers write roundups
> like these.
> 
> /rant
> 
> But I'd rather see things condensed to concrete suggestions of
> actions
> before hitting the mailing lists to ensure some real meat for
> discussions (just like Jason did), not just stating the
> opinion which,
> while probably interesting, doesn't really help advancing the
> "cause".
> 
> --
> Kalle Vahlman, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Powered by http://movial.fi
> Interesting stuff at http://syslog.movial.fi
> 
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> ___
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-- 
Anders Feder <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>

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Re: Discussions on Pgo was: Re: Need Leadership

[natan yellin]

On Mon, Jun 23, 2008 at 9:26 PM, Kalle Vahlman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote:

> 2008/6/23 BJörn Lindqvist <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
> > Pgo is good for getting to know the daily lives of gnome hackers and
> > stuff. But it shouldn't act as a general debating board. That's what
> > mailing lists are for.
>
> I'd like to state my exactly opposite feeling, pgo is the correct
> medium for opinions and analysis of current state of "decadence".
> There one can go on about dreams and stuff for all eternity for all I
> care.
>
Assuming that your blog is in the feed, then yes.

The only real solution that I'd be happy with would be a "smart planet" that
tracks tracebacks to posts in the feed and includes the popular ones even if
_those_ blogs aren't in the feed themselves. Still, for now, the best we can
do is have pgo bloggers write roundups like
these.

/rant

> But I'd rather see things condensed to concrete suggestions of actions
> before hitting the mailing lists to ensure some real meat for
> discussions (just like Jason did), not just stating the opinion which,
> while probably interesting, doesn't really help advancing the "cause".
>
> --
> Kalle Vahlman, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Powered by http://movial.fi
> Interesting stuff at http://syslog.movial.fi
> ___
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> http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
>
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Re: Discussions on Pgo was: Re: Need Leadership

[Kalle Vahlman]

2008/6/23 BJörn Lindqvist <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
> Pgo is good for getting to know the daily lives of gnome hackers and
> stuff. But it shouldn't act as a general debating board. That's what
> mailing lists are for.

I'd like to state my exactly opposite feeling, pgo is the correct
medium for opinions and analysis of current state of "decadence".
There one can go on about dreams and stuff for all eternity for all I
care.

But I'd rather see things condensed to concrete suggestions of actions
before hitting the mailing lists to ensure some real meat for
discussions (just like Jason did), not just stating the opinion which,
while probably interesting, doesn't really help advancing the "cause".

-- 
Kalle Vahlman, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Powered by http://movial.fi
Interesting stuff at http://syslog.movial.fi
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Discussions on Pgo was: Re: Need Leadership

[BJörn Lindqvist]

I have thought about this for a while... This is the first thread
about "decadence in gnome" on desktop-devel, while the topic has been
discussed on planet.gnome.org for quite some time. It seems to me that
pgo is in a way usurping the mailinglist which have become rather
boring. Not much is posted except for release announcements.


Pgo is good for getting to know the daily lives of gnome hackers and
stuff. But it shouldn't act as a general debating board. That's what
mailing lists are for.


So, here is my plea for Pgo bloggers to write mails instead of keeping
the talk in the blogs. I'm not trying to tell anyone what they should
or shouldn't do or trying to impose any rules. Just a humble
suggestion which you are free to ignore.


And now excuse me while i go read why the hell gnome is decadent. :-)


2008/6/21, Jason D. Clinton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
> I know that a lot of discussion around this topic will be taking place (in
> smoke filled rooms) at GUADEC but for those of us who can't afford to make
> the trip, some of this conversation needs to be had here on this mailing
> list (and pointedly not on foundation-list on which many developers are not
> subscribed). This mail is born out of a combination of frustration over a
> lack of action taken from Decadence Thread and the continuing reality check
> that Linux Haters Blog is giving our collective community.
>
> We need to tap in to the wave of energy generated by the The Thread on
> Planet Gnome. Already, it's apparent that the fervor that surrounded it has
> started to dwindle. A ton of interesting ideas were thrown out and lot of
> belly-aching about no one taking responsibility for making it happen was
> heard.
>
> I'm going to keep this short because I know attention spans are, as well.
> Please keep the conversation here and NOT on P.G.O--this should be a
> conversation that everyone feels invited to participate in and which
> hopefully spans the length of GUADEC, itself.
>
> It's clear from The Thread that we need to "Get Our House In Order". There's
> nearly universal agreement that Gnome lacks leadership in the sense that
> there's someone that sets release goals.
>
> In my opinion, whatever "The Next-Gen Gnome" is, it isn't going to happen
> until we really, really have a deep maintenance cycle going on here. That
> means fixing a Handful of Giant Warts on our maintenance process:
>
> 1. DVCS needs to happen; now. It's time. The number of people using a DVCS
> frontend to circumvent the insanity of SVN continues to grow. In that vein,
> we need to a) debate the One True DVCS for Gnome, b) delinate the work that
> needs to be done to get there and set a timeframe, and c) find the man power
> to do it.
>
> 2. The Giant Rift in the Gnome community over Mono has to end. I hate Mono
> as much as the next guy but it's quite apparent now that some really cool
> stuff with financial backing from Big Linux Distributor is not going away:
> Gnome Main Menu, Banshee, F-Spot, Beagle, Tomboy, etc. We have to get rid of
> the rift and bring the two diverging communities back together. Whatever
> damage that might incur in the minds of the Slashdot crowd has already been
> done--Gnome is perceived (rightly or wrongly) to be largley 'infested with
> Mono' in the minds of our critics. We cannot capitulate on this to appease a
> vocal minority of users that detest Mono. It's obvious it's not going away
> and, with a trivial amount of work, we can mend the rift by including the
> afore-mentioned mondules in our official releases. Let's just do it and move
> on with our lives.
>
> 3. Marketing to developers must get ramped up; we agree that we need a new
> generation of awesome developers to bring new ideas and blood in to our
> process. A number of our Gnome modules are in "barely maintained" mode. With
> new blood, we can reinvigorate 2.x while looking to the future. And I've
> volunteer for this one in the form of 15 minute screen casts. However, it
> needs web hosting space. And that needs Gnome resources. What do we have to
> do to make this hosting happen? What else can we do to get more developers?
>
> Please keep this thread a conversation and not an arguement.
>


-- 
mvh Björn
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Re: Need Leadership

[Murray Cumming]

On Sat, 2008-06-21 at 16:14 -0500, Jason D. Clinton wrote:
[snip]
> there's a bug open against
> Iagno in which a non-native English speaker has re-written the entire
> game
> from the ground-up adding multi-player; the diff is 4,000 lines. I
> really
> like where it's going but unfortunately, as someone new to FOSS he
> really
> didn't understand the "contributing patch-sets" custom that we've come
> to
> all agree on. Now, if we were using DVCS, I could have this new
> version of
> Iagno incorporated in a mater of days because all the changes would be
> incrementally documented with rationale. Instead, we're looking at
> months of
> work to break his changes in to peer-reviewed patch-sets that are
> documented
> and transparent from the perspective of the ChangeLogs. (ie. "blame"
> outputting a person's name and the rational for a change on a per-line
> basis).
[snip]

If he couldn't understand the current way of doing things without asking
you, then it's even less likely that he would magically understand that
he should do local commits with a DVCS.
 
-- 
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
www.murrayc.com
www.openismus.com

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Re: Need Leadership

[Mikkel Kamstrup Erlandsen]

2008/6/21 Luis Villa <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
> On Sat, Jun 21, 2008 at 11:26 AM, Havoc Pennington <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> 2008/6/21 Jason D. Clinton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
>>> In my opinion, whatever "The Next-Gen Gnome" is, it isn't going to happen
>>> until we really, really have a deep maintenance cycle going on here. That
>>> means fixing a Handful of Giant Warts on our maintenance process:
>>
>> I bet the next-gen gnome will happen when someone writes it. I would
>> suggest people think in terms of getting something going by
>> themselves, and once it's at least roughly usable, think about
>> recruiting 2 or 3 or 5 other people to the project. But getting
>> hundreds of people to agree up front isn't too likely. Think 5 not
>> 500.
>
> +1. This is not a gigantic company- you don't have to persuade the
> management to get permission to innovate. You have the code, and
> potentially you have the idea. So JFDI. If it is worthwhile, more
> people will come.

I believe that what you and Havoc propose here is plain naiive. The
landscape has changed since Gnome 2.0. Coorporations have grown,
expectations are climbing each day, both from users and developers. I
believe Gnome to be in a Nash equilibrium[1] from a developer's pow.
New developers will basically have to come from Gnome or XFCE. Green
developers have next to no chance of following the bumpy ride in the
start and little motivation to do so because they have Gnome and XFCE
as alternatives.

It is going to take a handful skilled hackers with basically unlimited
patience (to withstand flames and rants) and spare time to make a
"fork" viable. By "fork" I mean a fork of Gnome the project, not Gnome
the software stack, because that is basically what is needed. I agree
that 100s of developers are not needed.

On top of that some coorporation with Gnome needs to happen to avoid
making the same mistakes. I think we all know the history of software
companies that hires a new staff to do a rewrite of their flagship
product :-)

The thing that _has_ changed since Gnome 2.0 days is that we have a
much better development environment to work in, namely Gnome 2 :-)

Cheers,
Mikkel

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nash_equilibrium
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Re: Need Leadership

[Anders Feder]

lør, 21 06 2008 kl. 11:33 -0700, skrev Luis Villa: 
> +1. This is not a gigantic company- you don't have to persuade the
> management to get permission to innovate. You have the code, and
> potentially you have the idea. So JFDI. If it is worthwhile, more
> people will come.

That's a cool acronym, but hasn't that been the standing procedure
since, well, ever? Sure, it has produced a desktop environment beyond
anything I could personally conceive, but is that a particularly
interesting metric? I think most end-users could care less about the
flamewars on this and other lists.

Let's look instead at how likely GNOME is too sustain innovative
development. Hypothetically speaking, if I have a brilliant idea which
require cooperation from the maintainers of module X, Y and Z, how
likely is it that I will keep trying to JFDI if all said maintainers
refuse to cooperate and tell me to JFDI, citing a desire to work on
_their_ respective brilliant ideas? How likely is it that I will stick
around in the GNOME ecosystem rather than migrate to, oh say, Windows
where the development community and the potential for collaboration is
much much larger and I even have a decent chance of being paid for my
work?

I think you can count on most innovative folks being at least as
disinterested in being told to JFDI! as you are in working on their
ideas or listening to their visions - personally I don't see how this
fight-club attitude is more likely to save GNOME than a degree of formal
leadership or communication about interoperability.

-- 
Anders Feder <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>

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Re: Need Leadership

[Jason D. Clinton]

On Sat, Jun 21, 2008 at 1:26 PM, Havoc Pennington <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> 2008/6/21 Jason D. Clinton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
> > In my opinion, whatever "The Next-Gen Gnome" is, it isn't going to happen
> > until we really, really have a deep maintenance cycle going on here. That
> > means fixing a Handful of Giant Warts on our maintenance process:
>
> I bet the next-gen gnome will happen when someone writes it. I would
> suggest people think in terms of getting something going by
> themselves, and once it's at least roughly usable, think about
> recruiting 2 or 3 or 5 other people to the project. But getting
> hundreds of people to agree up front isn't too likely. Think 5 not
> 500.
>
> I'd suggest also that "next-gen gnome" is a bad framing. It's the same
> broken mindset as "GNOME 3.0." GNOME _the desktop_ does not need a 3.0
> or a next-gen in particular. I think most of the current users, and
> current involved OS vendors would basically be against major change in
> the target audience of today's GNOME desktop (current Linux users). I
> mean, even if individuals at those companies are in favor in
> principle, it's not their day job and their day job has major
> pressures to focus on the current audience.


I apologize for I intended this thread to be about getting our
ducks-in-a-row with regard to 2.x maintenance. It's my own fault for
piggy-backing off of Decadence Thread of which so much of that has been
about Gnome++.

I whole-heartedly agree with you that setting some lofty goal that everyone
has to buy-in to is antithetical to a healthy development process. But,
again, I got us off on the wrong foot by including the above sentence in my
post. Hopefully this thread can be more about doing the things that make
incremental improvements even easier and radical new experimentation
trivial.

Allow me this one concrete example: in Bugzilla, there's a bug open against
Iagno in which a non-native English speaker has re-written the entire game
from the ground-up adding multi-player; the diff is 4,000 lines. I really
like where it's going but unfortunately, as someone new to FOSS he really
didn't understand the "contributing patch-sets" custom that we've come to
all agree on. Now, if we were using DVCS, I could have this new version of
Iagno incorporated in a mater of days because all the changes would be
incrementally documented with rationale. Instead, we're looking at months of
work to break his changes in to peer-reviewed patch-sets that are documented
and transparent from the perspective of the ChangeLogs. (ie. "blame"
outputting a person's name and the rational for a change on a per-line
basis).


> Don't misunderstand my point here: I don't think anyone should "cave"
> to current users or commercial pressures. I do think that it's
> impractical to ignore almost everyone currently working on or using
> the software, though. You just can't fight that momentum. It isn't
> even correct to fight it. There are lots of users there with
> expectations.
>
> The goal is not to randomly churn up the GNOME desktop as it exists
> today (window manager, session manager, panel, etc.) - that thing
> should just keep evolving in incremental fashion, getting better all
> the time for the people who use it.


+1


> The goal should be to find all the new directions, and see if GNOME
> can start to be about those too. Right now there are lots of new
> directions in mobile, set-top boxes, EeePC-type thingies, for example.
> Why does the front page of gnome.org still say "GNOME offers a
> desktop" - excluding these directions from "GNOME"? That's a problem.
> The "GNOME stack" potentially has much wider applicability.


Excellent point.

Is there a list somewhere of the rich ecosystem of consulting
> companies and libraries and products that build on the GTK/GNOME
> technology stack? Why isn't gnome.org positioned as about that list,
> with "the desktop" as only one of the things on the list? I bet a
> solid fraction of our community isn't even primarily focused on "the
> desktop" anymore... could be a majority even. But the
> Fedora/Ubuntu/Suse framing of GNOME-as-desktop remains dominant
> despite all the smaller companies who are doing other stuff.


Yes. And your concerns are right. For example, Cristian Persch has been
working in my module on making games run on Maemo. Others have worked on
Windows ports. I, personally, love this work. What I would love to see,
however, is the development process and release schedule take in to account
the possibility that modules in Gnome are not all 100% aimed at the desktop.
For example, there hasn't been enough emphasis on release goals that have
targeted making our modules more portable. It seems we're stuck thinking:

  "What will this look like in the Release Notes when Gnome 2.x is release?"

As opposed to what would perhaps be a more healthy:

  "How does this make my module more universal?"

Setting release goals and rallying the troops to them is very much a
leadership 

Fwd: Need Leadership

[natan yellin]

-- Forwarded message --
From: Hubert Figuiere <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: Sat, Jun 21, 2008 at 11:34 PM
Subject: Re: Need Leadership
To: natan yellin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>



>
> Even if you interpret that as an anti-Mono rant, he still has a point
> with the rest of his email. The discussion over Gnome decadence does
> seem to be dying and it would be unfair to most of the community to
> limit conversations on the topic to GUADEC.
>

>

That's why you kept your reply private

Yeah, sorry. I'm forwarding this to the list.
Irony...

Hub
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Fwd: Need Leadership

[natan yellin]

Sorry, I accidentally replied off-list.

-- Forwarded message --
From: natan yellin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: Sat, Jun 21, 2008 at 10:01 PM
Subject: Re: Need Leadership
To: Luis Villa <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>




On Sat, Jun 21, 2008 at 9:48 PM, Luis Villa <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> On Sat, Jun 21, 2008 at 11:44 AM, natan yellin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> >> +1. This is not a gigantic company- you don't have to persuade the
> >> management to get permission to innovate. You have the code, and
> >> potentially you have the idea. So JFDI. If it is worthwhile, more
> >> people will come.
> >
> > That's true but exciting new ideas shouldn't be developed in hidden and
> > completely unofficial corners of the community.
>
> I didn't suggest that they should be; I said they didn't need
> permission. You can do your own thing, and still use the tools of the
> community to seek feedback and advice when you feel it is appropriate.
>
Sorry, I've only been here a few months, and I'm still trying to figure out
exactly how everything is done. My only point is that if there was a
centralized forum for the advancement of such ideas, the entire community
would benefit.

>
> Luis
>
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Re: Need Leadership

[Hubert Figuiere]

On Sat, 2008-06-21 at 14:26 -0500, Jason D. Clinton wrote:
> I can see how it could be taken that way. I also see now that Beagle
> has become an optional dependency of gnome-main-menu. Apologies for
> the confusion.

Oh no. Not that uninformed libbeagle rant again. libbeagle NEVER bring
Mono as a dependency, and never has.

Hint: beagle has been uninstalled on every of my openSUSE machines. And
I didn't recompile anything


Hub

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Re: Need Leadership

[Diego Escalante Urrelo]

Hey,

On 6/21/08, Jason D. Clinton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> I know that a lot of discussion around this topic will be taking place (in
> smoke filled rooms) at GUADEC but for those of us who can't afford to make
> the trip, some of this conversation needs to be had here on this mailing
> list (and pointedly not on foundation-list on which many developers are not
> subscribed). This mail is born out of a combination of frustration over a
> lack of action taken from Decadence Thread and the continuing reality check
> that Linux Haters Blog is giving our collective community.
>

LinuxHaters is just awesome.

> [...]
>
> 2. The Giant Rift in the Gnome community over Mono has to end. I hate Mono
> as much as the next guy but it's quite apparent now that some really cool
> stuff with financial backing from Big Linux Distributor is not going away:
> Gnome Main Menu, Banshee, F-Spot, Beagle, Tomboy, etc. We have to get rid of
> the rift and bring the two diverging communities back together. Whatever
> damage that might incur in the minds of the Slashdot crowd has already been
> done--Gnome is perceived (rightly or wrongly) to be largley 'infested with
> Mono' in the minds of our critics. We cannot capitulate on this to appease a
> vocal minority of users that detest Mono. It's obvious it's not going away
> and, with a trivial amount of work, we can mend the rift by including the
> afore-mentioned mondules in our official releases. Let's just do it and move
> on with our lives.
>

Let's not waste bits in this topic. The more we talk about it, the
more it seems to be an issue, when it's not. You'll always find
someone against it.

> 3. Marketing to developers must get ramped up; we agree that we need a new
> generation of awesome developers to bring new ideas and blood in to our
> process. A number of our Gnome modules are in "barely maintained" mode. With
> new blood, we can reinvigorate 2.x while looking to the future. And I've
> volunteer for this one in the form of 15 minute screen casts. However, it
> needs web hosting space. And that needs Gnome resources. What do we have to
> do to make this hosting happen? What else can we do to get more developers?
>

Frustration is born from not being able to do what you know you can or
must do, and I don't see how is it that you are being stopped of
recording the videos you want to do.

If you need space in gnome.org, I'm sure anyone in this thread will be
happy to scp your videos to their homes in gnome.org, in the worst
case.
In the best case, pasting an URL with your videos will put the blocker
on web team directly. Right now the blocker is on you! We can't upload
videos we don't have!.
If you are willing to do the videos, then just record them, everyone
will be happy to have such contribution, I think your idea is great.
But as I just said, given that you are the one willing to do the
videos, everyone is waiting for you to do them. As soon as you fulfill
this expectation, the new one will be "where are the webmasters? why
haven't they link to these cool videos?", or even better, someone will
say "what about $MYDISTRO? I guess I'll have to record a video!".

So, basically: do what you want to do, things will just happen when
you are done, in the worst case you'll have clear culprits to point
to.

greetings
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Re: Need Leadership

[Jason D. Clinton]

On Sat, Jun 21, 2008 at 2:07 PM, Cody Russell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> On Sat, 2008-06-21 at 13:47 -0500, Jason D. Clinton wrote:
> > I don't see what Gnome Main Menu is doing in your anti-Mono
> > rant. Or
> > maybe you are and editing contributor of "BoycottNovell.com"
> > and decided
> > to spread the misinformation here where people actually tend
> > to know
> > what they are talking about.
> >
> >  How does "this is really cool stuff" constitute an anti-Mono rant?
> > You seem to have interpreted that paragraph as 100% opposite from what
> > I wrote...
>
> I think he was questioning why you included Gnome Main Menu in the
> paragraph about Mono, since Gnome Main Menu is written in C.
>
> But considering how you say you hate Mono as much as the next guy, it
> did come across as kind of an anti-Mono rant.  Unless "the next guy" is
> someone like me who actually likes Mono, then I suppose it could be
> interpreted that you like Mono.  But I don't think anyone is reading it
> that way. ;)


I can see how it could be taken that way. I also see now that Beagle has
become an optional dependency of gnome-main-menu. Apologies for the
confusion.
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Re: Need Leadership

[Cody Russell]

On Sat, 2008-06-21 at 13:47 -0500, Jason D. Clinton wrote:
> I don't see what Gnome Main Menu is doing in your anti-Mono
> rant. Or
> maybe you are and editing contributor of "BoycottNovell.com"
> and decided
> to spread the misinformation here where people actually tend
> to know
> what they are talking about.
> 
>  How does "this is really cool stuff" constitute an anti-Mono rant?
> You seem to have interpreted that paragraph as 100% opposite from what
> I wrote...

I think he was questioning why you included Gnome Main Menu in the
paragraph about Mono, since Gnome Main Menu is written in C.

But considering how you say you hate Mono as much as the next guy, it
did come across as kind of an anti-Mono rant.  Unless "the next guy" is
someone like me who actually likes Mono, then I suppose it could be
interpreted that you like Mono.  But I don't think anyone is reading it
that way. ;)

/ Cody

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Re: Need Leadership

[Jason D. Clinton]

On Sat, Jun 21, 2008 at 1:27 PM, Alberto Ruiz <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> 2008/6/21 Jason D. Clinton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
> And there's a discussion about it already, there's even a BoF at GUADEC
> around the topic.
>

PGO is the wrong place for that discussion and  as I said in the first
sentence of my email, this thread is for everyone; not just those that can
afford to go to GUADEC or who blog to PGO.


> 3. Marketing to developers must get ramped up; we agree that we need a new
>> generation of awesome developers to bring new ideas and blood in to our
>> process. A number of our Gnome modules are in "barely maintained" mode. With
>> new blood, we can reinvigorate 2.x while looking to the future. And I've
>> volunteer for this one in the form of 15 minute screen casts. However, it
>> needs web hosting space. And that needs Gnome resources. What do we have to
>> do to make this hosting happen? What else can we do to get more developers?
>
>
> Is there anything preventing you to put the videos at your GNOME's home
> directory and serve it through http? I can't see why those screencasts
> should wait before the hipotetically needed bandwidth is there.
>

This is a marketting effort. Nothing hurts something like that more than a
false-start. We need to make sure the bandwidth is there first.

Actually, you can just put those videos at youtube and provide a secondary
> ogg link, that will solve the bandwidth problem and it wil provide an
> "usable" way to watch the video for most people, and a freedom-compilant
> version of the video.
>

YouTube doesn't provide sufficient quality for a screen cast. A screen cast
where you can't read the text defeats the purpose.


> As a side note, if you want to drive leadership I will strongly encourage
> you to avoid any sentence that starts with "I hate", if you have something
> against some developers' decisions on the tools they want to use, just give
> your rationale behind your opinion and recognize the benefits of what they
> use as well. Don't assume people is just wrong since that will inevitably
> drive the discussion into a passionate argue instead of a constructive
> conversation. Remember, encouraging people to move forward is way more
> important than making your personal points clear.


You also appear to have misread my email. I'm *advocating* the inclusion of
Mono with 100% approval so that we can MEND the rift in our community.
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Re: Need Leadership

[Jason D. Clinton]

On Sat, Jun 21, 2008 at 12:37 PM, Hubert Figuiere <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> On Sat, 2008-06-21 at 11:57 -0500, Jason D. Clinton wrote:
> > 2. The Giant Rift in the Gnome community over Mono has to end. I hate
> > Mono as much as the next guy but it's quite apparent now that some
> > really cool stuff with financial backing from Big Linux Distributor is
> > not going away: Gnome Main Menu, Banshee, F-Spot, Beagle, Tomboy, etc.
> > We have to get rid of the rift and bring the two diverging communities
> > back together. Whatever damage that might incur in the minds of the
> > Slashdot crowd has already been done--Gnome is perceived (rightly or
> > wrongly) to be largley 'infested with Mono' in the minds of our
> > critics. We cannot capitulate on this to appease a vocal minority of
> > users that detest Mono. It's obvious it's not going away and, with a
> > trivial amount of work, we can mend the rift by including the
> > afore-mentioned mondules in our official releases. Let's just do it
> > and move on with our lives.
>
>
> I don't see what Gnome Main Menu is doing in your anti-Mono rant. Or
> maybe you are and editing contributor of "BoycottNovell.com" and decided
> to spread the misinformation here where people actually tend to know
> what they are talking about.


 How does "this is really cool stuff" constitute an anti-Mono rant? You seem
to have interpreted that paragraph as 100% opposite from what I wrote...

*frustration*
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Re: Need Leadership

[Luis Villa]

On Sat, Jun 21, 2008 at 11:26 AM, Havoc Pennington <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> 2008/6/21 Jason D. Clinton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
>> In my opinion, whatever "The Next-Gen Gnome" is, it isn't going to happen
>> until we really, really have a deep maintenance cycle going on here. That
>> means fixing a Handful of Giant Warts on our maintenance process:
>
> I bet the next-gen gnome will happen when someone writes it. I would
> suggest people think in terms of getting something going by
> themselves, and once it's at least roughly usable, think about
> recruiting 2 or 3 or 5 other people to the project. But getting
> hundreds of people to agree up front isn't too likely. Think 5 not
> 500.

+1. This is not a gigantic company- you don't have to persuade the
management to get permission to innovate. You have the code, and
potentially you have the idea. So JFDI. If it is worthwhile, more
people will come.

git wouldn't hurt- anything that makes innovation by one person
/easier/ (like DVCS) gets us closer to the day someone runs off and
does Something Really Interesting. But like Havoc said the lack of it
isn't an excuse either.

Luis
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Re: Need Leadership

[Alberto Ruiz]

2008/6/21 Jason D. Clinton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:

> I know that a lot of discussion around this topic will be taking place (in
> smoke filled rooms) at GUADEC but for those of us who can't afford to make
> the trip, some of this conversation needs to be had here on this mailing
> list (and pointedly not on foundation-list on which many developers are not
> subscribed). This mail is born out of a combination of frustration over a
> lack of action taken from Decadence Thread and the continuing reality check
> that Linux Haters Blog is giving our collective community.
>
> We need to tap in to the wave of energy generated by the The Thread on
> Planet Gnome. Already, it's apparent that the fervor that surrounded it has
> started to dwindle. A ton of interesting ideas were thrown out and lot of
> belly-aching about no one taking responsibility for making it happen was
> heard.
>
> I'm going to keep this short because I know attention spans are, as well.
> Please keep the conversation here and NOT on P.G.O--this should be a
> conversation that everyone feels invited to participate in and which
> hopefully spans the length of GUADEC, itself.
>
> It's clear from The Thread that we need to "Get Our House In Order".
> There's nearly universal agreement that Gnome lacks leadership in the sense
> that there's someone that sets release goals.
>
> In my opinion, whatever "The Next-Gen Gnome" is, it isn't going to happen
> until we really, really have a deep maintenance cycle going on here. That
> means fixing a Handful of Giant Warts on our maintenance process:
>
> 1. DVCS needs to happen; now. It's time. The number of people using a DVCS
> frontend to circumvent the insanity of SVN continues to grow. In that vein,
> we need to a) debate the One True DVCS for Gnome, b) delinate the work that
> needs to be done to get there and set a timeframe, and c) find the man power
> to do it.
>

And there's a discussion about it already, there's even a BoF at GUADEC
around the topic.


> 3. Marketing to developers must get ramped up; we agree that we need a new
> generation of awesome developers to bring new ideas and blood in to our
> process. A number of our Gnome modules are in "barely maintained" mode. With
> new blood, we can reinvigorate 2.x while looking to the future. And I've
> volunteer for this one in the form of 15 minute screen casts. However, it
> needs web hosting space. And that needs Gnome resources. What do we have to
> do to make this hosting happen? What else can we do to get more developers?


Is there anything preventing you to put the videos at your GNOME's home
directory and serve it through http? I can't see why those screencasts
should wait before the hipotetically needed bandwidth is there.

Actually, you can just put those videos at youtube and provide a secondary
ogg link, that will solve the bandwidth problem and it will provide an
"usable" way to watch the video for most people, and a freedom-compilant
version of the video.

As a side note, if you want to drive leadership I will strongly encourage
you to avoid any sentence that starts with "I hate", if you have something
against some developers' decisions on the tools they want to use, just give
your rationale behind your opinion and recognize the benefits of what they
use as well. Don't assume people is just wrong since that will inevitably
drive the discussion into a passionate argue instead of a constructive
conversation. Remember, encouraging people to move forward is way more
important than making your personal points clear.

-- 
Cheers,
Alberto Ruiz
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Re: Need Leadership

[Havoc Pennington]

Hi,

2008/6/21 Jason D. Clinton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
> In my opinion, whatever "The Next-Gen Gnome" is, it isn't going to happen
> until we really, really have a deep maintenance cycle going on here. That
> means fixing a Handful of Giant Warts on our maintenance process:

I bet the next-gen gnome will happen when someone writes it. I would
suggest people think in terms of getting something going by
themselves, and once it's at least roughly usable, think about
recruiting 2 or 3 or 5 other people to the project. But getting
hundreds of people to agree up front isn't too likely. Think 5 not
500.

I'd suggest also that "next-gen gnome" is a bad framing. It's the same
broken mindset as "GNOME 3.0." GNOME _the desktop_ does not need a 3.0
or a next-gen in particular. I think most of the current users, and
current involved OS vendors would basically be against major change in
the target audience of today's GNOME desktop (current Linux users). I
mean, even if individuals at those companies are in favor in
principle, it's not their day job and their day job has major
pressures to focus on the current audience.

Don't misunderstand my point here: I don't think anyone should "cave"
to current users or commercial pressures. I do think that it's
impractical to ignore almost everyone currently working on or using
the software, though. You just can't fight that momentum. It isn't
even correct to fight it. There are lots of users there with
expectations.

The goal is not to randomly churn up the GNOME desktop as it exists
today (window manager, session manager, panel, etc.) - that thing
should just keep evolving in incremental fashion, getting better all
the time for the people who use it.

The goal should be to find all the new directions, and see if GNOME
can start to be about those too. Right now there are lots of new
directions in mobile, set-top boxes, EeePC-type thingies, for example.
Why does the front page of gnome.org still say "GNOME offers a
desktop" - excluding these directions from "GNOME"? That's a problem.
The "GNOME stack" potentially has much wider applicability.

Is there a list somewhere of the rich ecosystem of consulting
companies and libraries and products that build on the GTK/GNOME
technology stack? Why isn't gnome.org positioned as about that list,
with "the desktop" as only one of the things on the list? I bet a
solid fraction of our community isn't even primarily focused on "the
desktop" anymore... could be a majority even. But the
Fedora/Ubuntu/Suse framing of GNOME-as-desktop remains dominant
despite all the smaller companies who are doing other stuff.

GNOME could be instead of "a desktop" something like "a development
community for open source user experience technologies, on all
platforms including Linux, Windows, and mobile devices" or something
like that. I don't know. Some broader goal. Describe the community,
not one of its products.

I don't think git or mono have much to do with anything. If you start
a 1-person or 5-person project, you can use whichever vcs or language
you want. And the bottom line is that anyone who blames their version
control system for inability to get stuff done is not the kind of
person who gets stuff done. git did not exist when the vast majority
of the tens of millions of lines of open source code were first
written. (Maybe GNOME or parts of GNOME should switch to git or mono,
not debating that, I just think it's bogus to say either one is truly
what's blocking innovative new projects.)

People should also think creatively about how to get things done,
beyond just writing code. Miguel and Nat back in the day created
International GNOME Support, and that was only one of the companies
involved. The GNOME Foundation was created as well. Today, you see
plenty of small companies around GNOME. These are all people thinking
not only about what code to write, but how to add more time and more
people focused on the project.

Havoc
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Re: Need Leadership

[Hubert Figuiere]

On Sat, 2008-06-21 at 11:57 -0500, Jason D. Clinton wrote:
> 2. The Giant Rift in the Gnome community over Mono has to end. I hate
> Mono as much as the next guy but it's quite apparent now that some
> really cool stuff with financial backing from Big Linux Distributor is
> not going away: Gnome Main Menu, Banshee, F-Spot, Beagle, Tomboy, etc.
> We have to get rid of the rift and bring the two diverging communities
> back together. Whatever damage that might incur in the minds of the
> Slashdot crowd has already been done--Gnome is perceived (rightly or
> wrongly) to be largley 'infested with Mono' in the minds of our
> critics. We cannot capitulate on this to appease a vocal minority of
> users that detest Mono. It's obvious it's not going away and, with a
> trivial amount of work, we can mend the rift by including the
> afore-mentioned mondules in our official releases. Let's just do it
> and move on with our lives.


I don't see what Gnome Main Menu is doing in your anti-Mono rant. Or
maybe you are and editing contributor of "BoycottNovell.com" and decided
to spread the misinformation here where people actually tend to know
what they are talking about.


Hub

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Need Leadership

[Jason D. Clinton]

I know that a lot of discussion around this topic will be taking place (in
smoke filled rooms) at GUADEC but for those of us who can't afford to make
the trip, some of this conversation needs to be had here on this mailing
list (and pointedly not on foundation-list on which many developers are not
subscribed). This mail is born out of a combination of frustration over a
lack of action taken from Decadence Thread and the continuing reality check
that Linux Haters Blog is giving our collective community.

We need to tap in to the wave of energy generated by the The Thread on
Planet Gnome. Already, it's apparent that the fervor that surrounded it has
started to dwindle. A ton of interesting ideas were thrown out and lot of
belly-aching about no one taking responsibility for making it happen was
heard.

I'm going to keep this short because I know attention spans are, as well.
Please keep the conversation here and NOT on P.G.O--this should be a
conversation that everyone feels invited to participate in and which
hopefully spans the length of GUADEC, itself.

It's clear from The Thread that we need to "Get Our House In Order". There's
nearly universal agreement that Gnome lacks leadership in the sense that
there's someone that sets release goals.

In my opinion, whatever "The Next-Gen Gnome" is, it isn't going to happen
until we really, really have a deep maintenance cycle going on here. That
means fixing a Handful of Giant Warts on our maintenance process:

1. DVCS needs to happen; now. It's time. The number of people using a DVCS
frontend to circumvent the insanity of SVN continues to grow. In that vein,
we need to a) debate the One True DVCS for Gnome, b) delinate the work that
needs to be done to get there and set a timeframe, and c) find the man power
to do it.

2. The Giant Rift in the Gnome community over Mono has to end. I hate Mono
as much as the next guy but it's quite apparent now that some really cool
stuff with financial backing from Big Linux Distributor is not going away:
Gnome Main Menu, Banshee, F-Spot, Beagle, Tomboy, etc. We have to get rid of
the rift and bring the two diverging communities back together. Whatever
damage that might incur in the minds of the Slashdot crowd has already been
done--Gnome is perceived (rightly or wrongly) to be largley 'infested with
Mono' in the minds of our critics. We cannot capitulate on this to appease a
vocal minority of users that detest Mono. It's obvious it's not going away
and, with a trivial amount of work, we can mend the rift by including the
afore-mentioned mondules in our official releases. Let's just do it and move
on with our lives.

3. Marketing to developers must get ramped up; we agree that we need a new
generation of awesome developers to bring new ideas and blood in to our
process. A number of our Gnome modules are in "barely maintained" mode. With
new blood, we can reinvigorate 2.x while looking to the future. And I've
volunteer for this one in the form of 15 minute screen casts. However, it
needs web hosting space. And that needs Gnome resources. What do we have to
do to make this hosting happen? What else can we do to get more developers?

Please keep this thread a conversation and not an arguement.
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