Proposal: Desktop Search hackfest
Proposal: Desktop Search Hackfest. Calling to: Xesam, Beagle, Tracker projects and whoever else is involved. When: September 19 + the days the developers decide before after. Where: Berlin. Why: The Board made a call to organize hackfest around events and the Maemo Summit has answered. Budget: Funded by Nokia within reasonable terms. But why? Ok, let me explain. We have some budget to sponsor participants to https://wiki.maemo.org/Maemo_Summit_2008 . We want to find a balance between Maemo community contributors, related upstream developers and core developers of the Maemo SW team at Nokia. We think organizing a GNOME hackfest is a win-win. Desktop search is an interesting area. Federico explained in GUADEC the problems of Oralia finding her stuff and there are many more things unsolved. It is becoming a critical area, considering that users are getting more volumes of data, more types of files and they have them spread through several devices and the Internet. We also find interesting to support areas that are not seen as mobile only. There are many, and in fact mobile companies like Nokia are supporting the development of features and components that many people don't even see as mobile related since they find them in their PCs and laptops. Desktop search affects everybody, even if it's perhaps more demanding in mobile devices (less processing power, different form factors, probably different input methods, surely less patience from the user on-the-go --- higher chances to FAIL). In the GNOME family this is a delicate topic: ask the Beagle, Tracker or Xesam hackers why. Yet there must be a possibility to find a common mission and specific objectives for a Hackfest. The first Desktop Search Hackfest ever? Each project can find also the time to meet and get some progress in their own areas. It is up to the developers to define the goals of the hackfest. Maemo has some developers working on Tracker and they like the idea. It has been discussed briefly in the gnome-movile-devel list and at least Behdad and Vincent agree (in fact this was their idea, I was proposing a Tracker hackfest but the Desktop Search idea is cooler). We are looking for more opinions and support for a consensus. The time runs fast and September is around the corner. Feedback welcome NOW! -- Quim Gil /// http://flors.wordpress.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Proposal: Desktop Search hackfest
Hi, On Mon, Jul 21, 2008 at 11:07 AM, Quim Gil [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Proposal: Desktop Search Hackfest. Calling to: Xesam, Beagle, Tracker projects and whoever else is involved. When: September 19 + the days the developers decide before after. Where: Berlin. Why: The Board made a call to organize hackfest around events and the Maemo Summit has answered. Budget: Funded by Nokia within reasonable terms. Sounds like a good idea, but I don't have the vacation time to make the trip, so I'd be unable to make a hackfest outside of Boston. Somehow I doubt that Nokia's reasonable terms include paying my salary. ;) That's probably ok anyway because I haven't been doing Beagle hacking lately and have been in my co-maintainer's accurate description an armchair quarterback. I don't think that the other two main Beagle hackers (dBera and Arun) are on this list -- one of them being a KDE guy -- but I've forwarded the email to them privately. The best way to reach them would be on the dashboard-hackers mailing list: http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/dashboard-hackers Joe ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Proposal: Desktop Search hackfest
Quim Gil schrieb: Proposal: Desktop Search Hackfest. Calling to: Xesam, Beagle, Tracker projects and whoever else is involved. When: September 19 + the days the developers decide before after. Where: Berlin. Why: The Board made a call to organize hackfest around events and the Maemo Summit has answered. Budget: Funded by Nokia within reasonable terms. But why? Ok, let me explain. We have some budget to sponsor participants to https://wiki.maemo.org/Maemo_Summit_2008 . We want to find a balance between Maemo community contributors, related upstream developers and core developers of the Maemo SW team at Nokia. We think organizing a GNOME hackfest is a win-win. Desktop search is an interesting area. Federico explained in GUADEC the problems of Oralia finding her stuff and there are many more things unsolved. It is becoming a critical area, considering that users are getting more volumes of data, more types of files and they have them spread through several devices and the Internet. We also find interesting to support areas that are not seen as mobile only. There are many, and in fact mobile companies like Nokia are supporting the development of features and components that many people don't even see as mobile related since they find them in their PCs and laptops. Desktop search affects everybody, even if it's perhaps more demanding in mobile devices (less processing power, different form factors, probably different input methods, surely less patience from the user on-the-go --- higher chances to FAIL). In the GNOME family this is a delicate topic: ask the Beagle, Tracker or Xesam hackers why. Yet there must be a possibility to find a common mission and specific objectives for a Hackfest. The first Desktop Search Hackfest ever? Each project can find also the time to meet and get some progress in their own areas. It is up to the developers to define the goals of the hackfest. Maemo has some developers working on Tracker and they like the idea. It has been discussed briefly in the gnome-movile-devel list and at least Behdad and Vincent agree (in fact this was their idea, I was proposing a Tracker hackfest but the Desktop Search idea is cooler). We are looking for more opinions and support for a consensus. The time runs fast and September is around the corner. Feedback welcome NOW! Uniting the linux desktop search world is something I'm looking forward for a long time. Obviously, Xesam's goal is to make that happen. I personally wanted to see a Xesam Deskbar plugin for a long time and get rid of separate beagle and tracker plugins. However, neither me nor kamstrup have been able to this. A hackfest would be a great opportunity to get this done. -- Greetings, Sebastian Pölsterl ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Proposal: Desktop Search hackfest
Thanks all for the quick answers! On Mon, Jul 21, 2008 at 6:52 PM, Jamie McCracken [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I would prefer it if it was Desktop search and *Metadata* as the search aspect is already well covered in Xesam but the use of a centralised metadata is critical to having a well integrated desktop. The details are up to you guys. I have driven the idea until the point of proposing one broad topic and having some budget to cover it. I'm almost done. ;) To tell you the truth, now I'm more worried about the finantial details. Once the hackfest is confirmed with a rough estimation of the budget I will be able to make decisions on other Maemo Summit related costs. You could agree on a broad idea about the mission and objectives. This would help the right people to decide to come. Then we know more or less how many people from which origins we have, and we can make a rough estimation (by Friday?) -- Quim Gil /// http://flors.wordpress.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Proposal: Desktop Search hackfest
On Mon, 21 Jul 2008 19:16:55 +0300, Quim Gil quimgil gmail com wrote: Thanks all for the quick answers! On Mon, Jul 21, 2008 at 6:52 PM, Jamie McCracken jamie mccrack googlemail com wrote: I would prefer it if it was Desktop search and *Metadata* as the search aspect is already well covered in Xesam but the use of a centralised metadata is critical to having a well integrated desktop. The details are up to you guys. I have driven the idea until the point of proposing one broad topic and having some budget to cover it. I'm almost done. ;) To tell you the truth, now I'm more worried about the finantial details. Once the hackfest is confirmed with a rough estimation of the budget I will be able to make decisions on other Maemo Summit related costs. You could agree on a broad idea about the mission and objectives. This would help the right people to decide to come. Then we know more or less how many people from which origins we have, and we can make a rough estimation (by Friday?) Uh, this all sounds like a great idea! I am going on a two week holiday this Tuesday (tomorrow) so I only have time to throw in my loose thoughts tonight. Note that this is very much biased towards Xesam in general (surprise!). Brain storm ahead: === Concrete Coding Tasks === - Xesam integration in file chooser and Nautilus. Possibly use xesam-glib - Create language bindings for xesam-glib (specifically Vala, C#, and Python) for xesam-glib and use these achieve * a deskbar module * a Gnome Do add-in - Create/draft a xesam-gtk library with widgets empowered by xesam-glib - Create a small server that exposes the Xesam search engine over Avahi (probably over http). This is correlated with the second point under BOFs. === BOF Sessions === - There are several metadata-heavy technologies emerging. Soylent, People, Online Desktop/Desktop Data Model, Xesam, and others. Can we somehow work more together? They all appear to take slightly different approaches. - Xesam over alternative protocols. Keywords: http/REST, Avahi, Bluetooth, XMLRPC, Soap, Plain ol' socket. - How can we integrate pervasive searching capabilities in the current Gnome desktop (ie. without changing the desktop interaction model) - How can we create a whole new user interface based on metadata and instant searches. Ie possibly breaking totally with the standard interaction model of the desktop. One possible starting point: * I've been sketching a do-what-I-think-desktop a while back. The basic premise is the user should not need to even touch the computer. It should just do the expected/desired in all circumstances without user interaction. Then see how far we can go with statistical analysis of historic user actions and rich metadata - and then accept that we can not achieve the end goal, but still get as close as possible. - A shared way to harvest metadata and register metadata extractors or sources. This is also relevant for Xesam. - Discuss the Xesam Metadata Storage spec. It is slated to be included in the post 1.0 release of Xesam, but there is very little concrete written down or agreed upon. This can seriously use a lot of discussion. It has ramifications into Soylent and desktop-data-model as well, probably others too. - Gnome and Nepomuk? Hitherto Gnome and Nepomuk has not really been related at all. Even though Xesam and Nepomuk has its disagreements we are also trying to collaborate. Should Gnome do more, what steps would be necessary to utilize Nepomuk technologies in Gnome? - Semantic Gnome? - Dashboard? Why has the idea that everybody loved never landed on consumer desktops? How can we make it real. What technical solutions do we need in place? - While it is pretty hype to talk about desktop search and even write lots of code for it, why is it not more integrated in the desktop than it is? A big reason is of course the quality of the search engine. I can think of a lot of other reasons though (feel the teaser!). === Meta === - It would be great to have RC3 of the Xesam Search spec ready at least a week or two ahead of this. It is likely to contain some (minor) API-breaks. Probably an updated xesam-glib to go with it too. - Given an updated Xesam spec it would be great to have all servers updated to the latest spec and have easy-to-set-up trunks or branches. The point is that a hack fest should not be spent with everybody trying to set up a privately circulated branch of MyGreatSearchEngine. === Me === I would very much like to attend. It is likely that I can reserve Sept. 19th+weekend if this is settled soonish. Bugger that I'm going on a no-internet vacation just now when planing will start. That was all I could conjure up tonight. Cheers, Mikkel ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
