Guadec focus.

[Miguel de Icaza <miguel ximian com>]

Hello,

	Summary: I think that we should make a departure from the
	traditional Linux-like conference which has been centered 
	around new developments, and instead focus on explaining our 
	technology to newcomers.

Rationale.

     I was reading over the charter for GUADEC, and I think that we
have an issue with the papers to be presented.  In general, we are not
really a research group, nor is GUADEC a researchy conference.   We
really are not in the same level as the ACM conferences or Usenix
conferences in terms of volume from the attendees nor our communities. 

     For instance, OLS used to be very interesting, but since it caters
to a relatively small community of developers, the innovation and new
material presented has become either boring, too specific and mostly
revolving around optimizations.

     I feel that  asking people to present papers on research topics or
new developments is going to lead to few papers, or repeating something
that we already know in the form of a paper with small incremental
changes.

     Maybe we should focus more on making GUADEC have sessions
describing technologies, and our focus should not be
paper-presentation, but trying to find people interested in doing one
hour or two hour sessions on GNOME and related technologies. 

     I think that we should make GUADEC a forum where people can learn
*mostly* about existing GNOME technologies and how they can apply this
to their software, and then you can sprinkle it with researchy or
two-point-next features.

     Doing something like the Java or .NET conferences: they explain in
sessions how to use a particular technology, so I feel that rather than
presenting papers on new development in Atk, or Gtk+, the conference
should cover things that would drive the interest of software
developers that might want to develop GNOME applications.

     So it would be nice if we got volunteer offerings to talk about
subjects that many of us just assume `we can read the source code, no
need for a tutorial', but that might be interesting to newcomers.

     And we can have several tracks at once, so we can have a track on
research, new items if we got the volume.

     Some ideas for the kind of sessions I would like to see are:

	* Gnome internationalization efforts.
		
	* Accessibility
		* Basics of accessibility.
		* Tools available for testing it.

	* GObject system

	* Gtk+ toolkit.

	* New directions for the Gtk+ toolkit.

	* Writing Nautilus Plugins.

	* Writing GAIM plugins.

	* Developing with Pango.

	* Writing Evolution plugins.

	* Developing Panel applets.

	* Automake and autoconf overviews.

	* Data Synchronization

	* D-BUS

	* Building Metacity themes.

	* Programming with GConf

	* Introduction to the HIG.

	* Gtk themes.

	* Freedesktop standard efforts.

	* GNOME release scheduling

	* How to integrate your app in the desktop
		.desktop files
		mime types
		gconf schema registration

	* HAL, where it stands today.

	* Using LibXML, libxslt.

	* GStreamer presentation

	* Using FreeType in your app

	* Developing with Python bindings.

	* Developing with Java bindings.

	* Developing with C# bindings.

	* Developing GIMP plugins.

	* Debugging GUI applications.

	* Glade tutorial.


Notice that the "Developing with XXX bindings" is a departure from the
more paper-like "How the binding has been developed, and these are the
new things on it".

Miguel.