[opensuse-artwork] Quotes/interviews wanted: how you got involved
Hi folks, I'm working on an article on getting involved in open source projects, aimed at non-technical people. I'd be keen to hear your stories about getting involved in doing openSUSE artwork and any other projects that you do. You can write a little or a lot, it's up to you. Something like how you first got involved, your background and tips on the best way to get started, any mistakes you made and so on. Suggestions on how to make your contributions 'count' and succeed would also be helpful. If you're not sure what to write, just jot down whatever comes into your head, and I can always take a quote from it, or ask you to clarify something with a follow up question. I'm trying to keep the tone as light and fun as possible. I'm writing the article in the first person, sharing some of my own experience, and will present the words of other people usually as a quote in a sort of interview style. If you just have any general suggestions and don't want to be specifically quoted, that's fine too. I think the article might include a couple of 'callout boxes' that are popular in this type of article, with a point list of tips or something like that. Don't worry if your English isn't good, I'll edit it and you can check it before I submit it. Depending on how much response I get and the total word count, I can't promise to include everything, but will try to represent you if I can, and there might be 'spin off' smaller articles I could place elsewhere. If you're keen to contribute and would have a nice clear promotional photograph of yourself at work, that would be fabulous too! + Any other images that you feel might be useful. I'm not sure where the final article will go, but I hope to submit it to a major user-focused magazine, possibly the UK 'Linux Format' mag if they'll bite, or a more general print computing mag, as I want to pick up the non technical audience - people who love Linux but aren't sysadmins or developers. Feel free to reply to me off-list if you wish. I've started a pirate pad. You can add your comments to that if you want (please make sure to include your name!!!) or email them to me. http://piratepad.net/tpJmpiYeNG cheers, Helen -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-artwork+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-artwork+help@opensuse.org
Mandag den 8. november 2010 02:43:57 skrev Helen:
I'm working on an article on getting involved in open source projects, aimed at non-technical people.
I'd be keen to hear your stories about getting involved in doing openSUSE artwork and any other projects that you do.
You can write a little or a lot, it's up to you. Something like how you first got involved, your background and tips on the best way to get started, any mistakes you made and so on.
Here's a brief story of how I got started doing the YaST Oxygen icon theme. Novell announced they'd no longer maintain the Crystal icon theme for YaST, and said nonsense like "Tango icons will integrate well in KDE4", I could not live with that, so I decided to try and collect an iconset using existing Oxygen icons - initially it was just intended for my own use and as a proof of concept. I thought it worked ok, so I put it on kde-look.org and blogged about it. To my surprise a lot of things started happening. Martin Lasarsch packaged the icon theme, Marco Michna wrote a yast theme selector module at Novell Hackweek and Stephan Kulow even committed the theme to be included in the actual distro. Initially I had just used Oxygen icons as they were, so the theme had a lot of duplicates and such, but now that people were actually using it I had to make it a lot better. I have no artistic skills at all - before getting myself into this situation, I think I had only ever launched Inkscape once or twice, but I polished up the theme a bit by modifying and "remixing" existing Oxygen icons. The YaST Oxygen icon theme has now been the default for KDE users for 3-4 releases - and I haven't heard too many complaints about it, though I think it could be a lot better if done by a proper experienced artist, but at least it beats using Tango icons. I have stories about many other non-technical contributions btw. if you're interested (translation, opensuse-guide.org, bugreporting, etc.) :-) -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-artwork+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-artwork+help@opensuse.org
This is perfect, Martin. Thanks so much! I don't suppose you have a nice shot of yourself at work? I can use a screenshot showing the icons. Rajko has contributed quite a bit about contributing to the Wiki and other written work. Bug reporting is an important one - any comments on that? I think it's something that newbies get a bit confused by. I've noticed on IRC that people will report a bug several times and so create extra work 'triaging' the bugs before they even get addressed. Also, the bug reporting system can be quite frustrating when people don't feel that their bug has been addressed. I'm not sure if this is heading towards the 'technical' side, although it's probably good for users to know that it's worthwhile to do a bug report in the first place. If anyone has any further comments or tips about artwork - even just something brief that you think I should consider - do let me know. I wonder, has there been any occasions where there's been problems with conflict due to work not being accepted, differences of opinion about design issues and so on? If so, how have these been resolved? I notice with the Ubuntu 'meritocracy', there's the design team that makes the decisions and others have to trust their judgment. I'm not sure that all projects run that way and often the 'power structure' seems very loose indeed, so I wonder who makes decisions! Any problems with image licensing? thanks, Helen On Mon, Nov 8, 2010 at 8:19 PM, Martin Schlander <martin.schlander@gmail.com> wrote:
Mandag den 8. november 2010 02:43:57 skrev Helen:
I'm working on an article on getting involved in open source projects, aimed at non-technical people.
I'd be keen to hear your stories about getting involved in doing openSUSE artwork and any other projects that you do.
You can write a little or a lot, it's up to you. Something like how you first got involved, your background and tips on the best way to get started, any mistakes you made and so on.
Here's a brief story of how I got started doing the YaST Oxygen icon theme.
Novell announced they'd no longer maintain the Crystal icon theme for YaST, and said nonsense like "Tango icons will integrate well in KDE4", I could not live with that, so I decided to try and collect an iconset using existing Oxygen icons - initially it was just intended for my own use and as a proof of concept. I thought it worked ok, so I put it on kde-look.org and blogged about it.
To my surprise a lot of things started happening. Martin Lasarsch packaged the icon theme, Marco Michna wrote a yast theme selector module at Novell Hackweek and Stephan Kulow even committed the theme to be included in the actual distro.
Initially I had just used Oxygen icons as they were, so the theme had a lot of duplicates and such, but now that people were actually using it I had to make it a lot better. I have no artistic skills at all - before getting myself into this situation, I think I had only ever launched Inkscape once or twice, but I polished up the theme a bit by modifying and "remixing" existing Oxygen icons.
The YaST Oxygen icon theme has now been the default for KDE users for 3-4 releases - and I haven't heard too many complaints about it, though I think it could be a lot better if done by a proper experienced artist, but at least it beats using Tango icons.
I have stories about many other non-technical contributions btw. if you're interested (translation, opensuse-guide.org, bugreporting, etc.) :-) -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-artwork+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-artwork+help@opensuse.org
-- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-artwork+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-artwork+help@opensuse.org
El Martes, 9 de Noviembre de 2010 04:30:22 Helen escribió: [...]
Any problems with image licensing?
In my case yes. Some months ago I made a small collection of oxygen icons (included some crystal/custom ones) for Apache's directory listing. I tried to push it upstream but it wasn't accepted because of incompatible licenses (LGPL vs Apache License). http://lizards.opensuse.org/2010/05/20/apache2-icons-oxygen-is-now-in-factor... Greetings, -- Javier Llorente
participants (3)
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Helen -
Javier Llorente -
Martin Schlander