On Jan 3, 2008, at 9:42 AM, Mikkel Kamstrup Erlandsen wrote: > To all the new people around here - please pay attention to Who, he > has been around here for a good while and knows the drill. …
Absolutely – there are a few people on this list who've been around for quite some time. I think this list is very fortunate to still have experienced people like Who and Troy around, but it's also good to see a lot of new enthusiastic people sharing their vision. > … > We came close to the real deal once, was it Dapper?, where we got a > few community themes, bundled, but not enabled, by default. I think you are referring to Edgy, as the Theme Teams were introduced in that release. Eventually three themes ended up in universe, being Blubuntu (Who / PingunZ), Peace (Chuck Huber) and Tropic (Viper550). While varying in quality and polish, the mere fact they were included was a sign that independent small community groups could work towards their own vision *and* meet the hard deadline constraints that were set for them. > This happened solely because of two things: > * A few people stood up and took responsibility for creating themes Indeed. There was a deadline for Theme Team applications a few weeks into the release cycle so that the theme leaders needed to be involved from the start up through a few weeks before release. For Edgy, four leaders stepped up with a serious proposal. During the development period, we regularly discussed progress and problems and where possible I tried to help out either myself or by getting the right people in touch with each other. > * Daniel Holbach saved our asses with a lot of packaging work we > really should have done our selves Daniel has historically helped out with a lot of packaging work, indeed. For the Edgy Theme Teams, we made sure he only had one final version to package per theme with room before the deadline, so they wouldn't burden him much. > I think it would be very valuable to have a "History Page" on the wiki > outlining the success and Failures of the art team. That would > probably help to make it clear how we are doomed to repeat history > unless people step up an take responsibility. While I can't say much about Feisty, Gutsy or Hardy-in-progress, I could tell you about Edgy. As far as I know, Edgy was the first (and last?) release to actively try and use community input as a viable source for distribution artwork. Postmortem I did an interview with Linux.com on the Edgy cycle, and there's some half-decent comments from Slashdot, too: http://www.linux.com/feature/58477 http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/11/14/2241255 ('Stroep' [sic]) It seems that all the history we built on the Wiki has been shoveled elsewhere or been dumped in a landfill altogether, but if you can find it, you might be able to reconstruct a decent timeline along with the mailing list. It was pretty high traffic during those days (July - October 2006) and the ML / Wiki combination seemed to work somewhat satisfactory. All in all, Edgy was edgy to me – as you can read in the interview the idea was to try something new, community artwork by default, and since there were no trodden roads available I did my best to get and keep things rolling in an enjoyable fashion. I think it worked out pretty well in terms of community involvement, enthusiasm, commitment, process structure and raw output. Slightly missing was the desired art *direction* but somehow I don't think that problem's been resolved ever since, no flame or offense intended. If you'd ask me now, sure I'd do things different based on the Edgy experience and the knowledge I've accumulated since then, but I think the Edgy cycle already showed a lot of potential for the future although it never got tapped into afterwards. Tell me if I'm wearing rose-colored glasses, thanks for reading. Sincerely, Frank -- ubuntu-art mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-art
