Planning for GNOME 3.0

[Vincent Untz <vuntz gnome org>]

During the first few months of 2008, a few Release Team members
discussed here and there about the state of GNOME. This was nothing
official, and it could actually have been considered as some friends
talking together about things they deeply care about. There were
thoughts that GNOME could stay with the 2.x branch for a very long time
given our solid development methods, but that it was not the future that
our community wants to see happening. Because of lack of excitement.
Because of lack of vision. Slowly, a plan started to emerge. It evolved,
changed, was trimmed a bit, made more solid. We started discussing with
a few more people, got more feedback. And then, at GUADEC, the Release
Team proposed an initial plan to the community that would lead the
project to GNOME 3.0. Quite some time passed; actually, too much time
passed because too many people were busy with other things. But it's
never too late to do the right thing, so let's really be serious about
GNOME 3.0 now!

Let's first diverge a bit and discuss the general impression that GNOME
is lacking a vision. If you look closely at our community, it'd be wrong
to say that people are lacking a vision; but the project as a whole does
indeed have this issue. What we are missing is people blessing one
specific vision and making it official, giving goals to the community so
we can all work together in the same direction. In the pre-2.x days, the
community accepted as a whole one specific vision, and such an explicit
blessing wasn't needed. But during the 2.x cycle, with our six months
schedules, it appeared that everything (community, development process,
etc.) was just working very well, and as the vision got more and more
fulfilled, the long-term plans became less important as we focused on
polishing our desktop. But we've now reached a point where our next
steps should be moving to another level, and those next steps require
important decisions. This is part of what the Release Team should do.
Please note that Release Team members don't have to be the ones who have
the vision; we "just" have to be the voice of the community.

(As a sidenote, the roadmap process [1] that we tried to re-establish
two years ago was a first attempt to fix this. Unfortunately, it turned
out that we were missing the most important side of things: a
project-wide roadmap. This is because a collection of individual
roadmaps isn't enough to create a project-wide roadmap.)

So let's go to the core topic and discuss what the GNOME 3.0 effort
should be. We propose the following list of areas to focus our efforts
on:

 - Revamp our User Experience
 - Streamlining of the Platform
 - Promotion of GNOME

There are also other potential areas that are worth exploring if there
is enough interest from the community.