Aloha,
2011/12/14 Lennart Poettering <mzta...@0pointer.de>
> On Tue, 13.12.11 21:42, Brian Cameron (brian.came...@oracle.com) wrote:
>
> Heya,
>
> > 1. It subtracts momentum from the GNOME brand and community. With
> > GNOME 3 to focus on, the community needs to more focus on making
> > GNOME 3 a success, less on collaboration.
>
> I ran the paper committee in Berlin. While I was very happy with how
> this worked out and there was very little friction between the KDE and
> GNOME sides of the committee (the only real friction was between some
> folks outside of the committee and the committee, where the committee
> stood together very well), I must actually say that I am clearly against
> the combined conference, because I think it is not for the benefit of
> GNOME, simply on the grounds that the contents of the conference
> suffered by having to be "fair" towards the KDE side.
>
> Firstly, we received substantially more GNOME talks than KDE
> talks. Secondly, the GNOME talks got consistently better votings by both
> sides than the KDE talks. Nonetheless we had to be somewhat fair and
> accept a similar amount of KDE talks as GNOME talks. The result is that
> we had to refuse a number of good GNOME talks in favour of accepting a
> lot of less-than-ideal KDE talks. And honestly, that's something that
> made me very unhappy. Ultimately we did accept slightly more GNOME talks
> than KDE talks (thankfully nobody noticed, so that this didn't become a
> big political issue), but still I found it very sad that we had to
> accept some low-quality KDE talks at the expense of higher-quality
> GNOME talks.
>
> This is actually made worse by the fact that the focus of the desktop
> summit was even wider than GNOME and KDE, and we even included
> Enlightenment talks (and the CFP asked for even more), which in my eyes
> are even less in the interest of GNOME.
>
> I believe the focus of a conference should be on the talks, the actual
> contents of a conference, not on whether it makes the organization
> simpler or easier. If we are willing to compromise this much on the
> contents, then this hurts GNOME and makes the conference a lot less
> interesting to attendees, because attendees come for the talks, not for
> the flawless organization.
>
> I think GNOME should really think about what is good for itself, not how
> to keep the peace. Effectively, KDE has a lot more to gain from a
> combined conference than GNOME has, the benefits of a joined conferenced
> are very unbalanced. I strongly believe GNOME should focus on what is
> good for GNOME, and much less on what is good for whatever else exists
> in the Free Software world. Our interest should be GNOME, and making
> GNOME great, and not at all making KDE great too, and Enlightenment, and
> whatever else exists.
>
> I'd even go further than this: I believe one of the goals of GNOME
> should be to emphasize vertical integration (i.e. considering
> integration of our stack, the GNOME OS a core objective), but
> encouraging multiple variables on top of this stack makes that much more
> complex. I think it is against our interest encouraging KDE and other
> desktop environments.
>
> And again, I am saying this purely in regards to the contents of the
> conference, personally I believe the KDE folks in the paper committee
> and outside of it did a great job, and especially Mirko did an
> exceptionally good job in running the entire conference.
>
> > 2. It is hard to measure what specific collaborative benefits are being
> > made possible by the Desktop Summit. It is hard to point to specific
> > advances that have been accomplished. Some have concerns that not a
> > lot of collaboration is actually being done.
>
> Judging by the papers we got I must say that this is indeed a major
> concern. The talks I think were actrually really relevant to both sides,
> one could count on the fingers of one hand. They did definitely exist,
> and even though we officially gave about a third of the schedule to them
> I honestly believe only a tiny fraction of those which were officially
> cross-desktop really mattered to both sides. I am tempted to say that
> given that this is the way it is a one day cross-desktop miniconf thingy
> would have more than sufficed to handle these. The question of course is
> whether this one day needs to take place at the desktop summit, or
> whether a forum like FOSDEM (where the cross-project idea is much more
> emphasized) might not be the better place to organize this.
>
> > 1. To not have a large combined GNOME+KDE event, and to instead have
> > a smaller Desktop Summit or focused hackfest(s) with a more clear
> > agenda to work on specific and measurable collaborative tasks.
> > GUADEC and Akademy would continue as separate events.
>
> I think this would be best. I'd suggest to organize this collaboration
> event collocated to FOSDEM.
>
> > 3. The GNOME community has been having trouble finding volunteers to
> > help make events successful lately. Some people like Dave Neary,
> > Lennart Poettering, and Ekaterina Gerasimova did a great job
> > volunteering to make the last Desktop Summit a success. However,
> > the fact that there were too few volunteers engaged caused some real
> > issues. Many of the things GNOME folks have complained about the
> > last Desktop Summit were caused more by a lack of GNOME volunteers
> > helping than anything else. For a Desktop Summit to be successful,
> > we need to more clearly see that the GNOME community is more
> > interested to engage and wanting to get involved.
>
> Hmm, I think Patricia Santana Cruz deserves to be named here, and since
> she oversaw the volunteers I'd be very interested in her opinion on
> this, and whether the lack of volunteers was indeed a big problem.
> Patricia?
>
Thanks for mentioning my name here Lennart.
I must say that I am very surprised about what I am reading here. We had 50
official volunteers working at the Desktop Summit this year, not counting
all the unofficial people that just came to help during the event and the
local team itself (around 14 people I think). The proportion of KDE and
GNOME people was very close to be equal, and the number of volunteers that
wanted to help was way over the amount of people we really needed to make
everything work. We never had a slot of time that was not covered in the
volunteers schedule. I do not think that this is really a matter of
numbers, but a matter of commitment. The biggest problems we had a few
times during the event regarding the volunteers were:
1. The first day, we did not have enough time to explain the volunteers
what they had to do during the event. The Summit starts early in the
morning and most of the volunteers are non local and usually arrive in the
city late the afternoon before. We have a few hours to explain them
everything, show them the venue, introduce to each other, etc... On the
other hand, I think this is pretty common in all these kind of events,
unless just locals organize it.
2. Some people came late on time. We just talked to them, and never
happened again.
3. Some people did not come to accomplish their task (this just
happened 2-3 times). We had several other volunteers who then replaced
them, so this was also not a problem.
Reallly, in my honest opinion, I would not qualify this as a problem at
all. I am actually very proud of how all the volunteering part worked out
and how the volunteers worked together to accomplish each task, and when I
write I, I think I talk on behalf of the whole team.
It would be very helpfull to mention, why people think that "real issues
were caused more by a lack of GNOME volunteers". Where did they miss the
volunteers? Perhaps this was a problem in the organization and not in the
number of volunteers again, regardless if they are coming from KDE or
GNOME :)
Patricia.
> Lennart
>
> --
> Lennart Poettering - Red Hat, Inc.
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