Boston Summit 2006 is on Echelon's radar

[Patrick Wagstrom <pwagstro andrew cmu edu>]

Howdy Folks,

Does it sometimes feel like managing all your GNOME related information
is like drinking from a firehose?  Are you disappointed with how
difficult it can be to find that marble of interesting projcet
information in the swimming pool of oatmeal that is the constant chatter
of GNOME worldwide?  Are you looking for a better way to understand
what's hot in email, CVS, blogs, bugzilla, and still get all the useless
links off #gnome-hackers?

Fortunately, there's creepy folks like me who have been tracking a lot
of that information.  The problem has been how do we expose all this
information to everyone in a method that is beautiful and makes sense.
The answer, Echelon for GNOME.  Echelon for GNOME is a project to make
sense of all this data.  What's hot on Planet GNOME?  Has there been a
really cool CVS commit in the past few days that you just need to check
out?  With all the mailing list threads, wouldn't it be nice if I could
just see the ones that other people think are interesting?

After discussing a myriad of ways that we could rip off KDE's English
Breakfast Network, we concluded that a digg like interface that can
bring all these things together would be a great innovation.  That, is
the premise of Echelon for GNOME.  Is it ambitious, probably.  Is it
cool, yes!  Can we actually use the term "digg" for when we find
something cool, probably not.  Instead, we'll VERB it (where verb is
something like excavate, drill, stomp, flag, shimmy, dance, shake, etc).

Interested?  Me too.  I've put a brief wiki page with some of the
discussion notes at http://live.gnome.org/Boston2006/EchelonForGnome
Feel free to look and modify it.

--Patrick