OK, I've been a part of the art-team since the very beginning. We started out by being a bunch of people who liked art and wanted to help the Ubuntu community in some way... some by contributing web graphics (powered by ubuntu, etc), some by creating wall papers, others by creating themes, and yet others by simply giving feedback and encouragement.
Then, we had a drive to make the art-team productive... instead of just being a community of artists and enthusiasts we became driven to produce something. Make specs, complete specs, etc. That's not bad, but its starting to feel like the team is burned out and it appears that activity has plummeted. While we struggle to regain our identity and get back on track to produce something, lets distract ourselves a bit and return to our roots. Let's just do art for fun again for a while. Here's my suggestion. But first, some people know that I have a canonical.com email address... I am not using that address because I am speaking as a fellow art-team member. This is just my own personal hair-brained idea, not that of my employer. Many people participate and contribute to the Ubuntu community by creating packages that get into Universe. Now, while it's really exciting to have packages in main, it's still cool to be in Universe and a lot of people use it. My suggestion is that we create a package called art-team-edgy (or art-team-feisty) and elect an "artist in chief" (aic) for a release. The team, lead by the aic, will choose a palette and a few guidelines and then engage the community to create a desktop artwork package that meets the guidelines. To complement the package we would also have art-team-edgy-calendar (or whatever) that would have a new background monthly until the next release and then continuing on as long as that release's aic gets contributions. I'm not suggesting a coup, I'm just suggesting something to make contributing art fun. Maybe our process will get good enough so that one day we could get art-team-* into main, but again, by not making that the immediate goal it gives us a lot of freedom. It also gives a lot of artists the opportunity to contribute, since new backgrounds will be out monthly. The aic would be elected by the team and would be the person to make the final decision for art during that release. The team would vote and cast opinions, but it would be the tabdfr (team appointed benevolent dictator for release) who gets to take the votes into consideration and make the final call - note that this is different than a democracy, the only democratic part is who the aic is. This is just a suggestion, I'll leave it to the team to decide how the role should work if we decide to do this, but my $0.02 worth is that without a leader to make a final, potentially difficult decision, some important decisions will get lost in the committees. So, Feisty releases in a few months. We know practically nothing about what to expect for that release, but that's OK. We know it will use gnome 2.18and soon we'll know if it will have a compositing window manager. If we're not aiming for main, we can do whatever we want... polka dots, stripes, flames, kittens, whatever. We can choose our palette, our icon theme (although it makes sense to go with the flow of course), everything! OK, I've been thinking about this for a while, and I even mentioned the calendar idea a couple months ago... I saw the recent bug report (#77289) and this forum thread recently http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=326420 and decided to get my it in gear and actually do something (send this e-mail). How about some people +1 this if they like the idea, ensuring to note if they feel competent enough to contribute a monthly background. We'd also need a person willing to be the scape goat and be the first aic... -- Matthew Nuzum www.bearfruit.org newz2000 on freenode
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