On Thu, 2010-03-25 at 18:33 +0530, Atri Bhattacharya wrote:
In my opinion the GNOME Community (or any of the smaller teams, e.g. KDE Community) needs a leader/community coordinator (with good knowledge of GNOME and involved in upstream efforts as well) who will organise and channelise community efforts. Such a person could try and formulate short term plans, publicise them from time to time and seek the help of the community to get these done. At the moment I think there is good direction with the GNOME team (and the releases are excellent) but plans, both short term and long term are not publicised enough (or perhaps they are and I have just missed them, if so apologies!).
Well I think we are in a very good position with providing upstream resources. As it happens the GNOME team have a great person in the one and only Vintcent Untz. One issue that we have is that because Vincent does such a good job he is in *huge* demand not just by openSUSE (where he works in the GNOME team but also in the Boosters) but also by upstream GNOME. He has managed to get some items covered by others, but he only has so much time before he falls over with fatigue - and we do *not* want vuntz to burn out! I have mentioned before how the GNOME team certainly seemed much more invigorated with a great buzz about it between the 11.0 and 11.1 releases. When analysing why this was so, it was pointed out to me that there were a lot more Novellians working with us openly, and we had a great steward in JP Rosevear. Unfortunately there have been some redundancies at Novell which affected not just GNOME but the whole openSUSE ecosystem; this is not the only factor that hinders us, we are suffering in part from Novell's success with SLE. Ideally I'd like to see more of the SLE guys & gals working out in the open, but they have some nasty deadlines to hit atm so maybe in the near future. You are not alone with your concern about long-term and short-term plans, and it is not just GNOME that is affected by the lack publication. One of the issues is making sure that whomever it is that takes the stewardship seat has the time required to do it all. I would nominate Vincent as our leader, but I'm not so sure there are enough hours in a day for him to do it. Do we need more resources from Novell? If so best we make a damned good case for it ;-)
As an example someone could do a monthly round-up of developments taking place in the openSUSE GNOME landscape using this mailing list and pin down where help is required with pointers for new interested helpers, etc.
Well we are hoping to get bi-weekly meetings back up and running again soon, and as such we will be able to have minutes etc published for all to see and comment on.
Bye, and thanks for starting up this discussion.
Thank you for joining in the discussion. If you think of anything else then let us know :-) Regards, Andy -- Andrew Wafaa, openSUSE Member: FunkyPenguin. PGP: 0x3A36312F openSUSE: Get It, Discover It, Create It at http://www.opensuse.org