Re: GNOME at SCALE 12x

[Paul M Edwards <pauledwards gmail com>]

Hello all,

I'm writing to provide a post-SCaLE 12x debriefing-style follow-up.

Here is a picture I posted of the booth setup and some volunteers:

https://plus.google.com/105665929212275882883/posts/BjhbJK8fJpK

Things actually went quite well in spite of the last-minute nature of our preparations. I was able to get 8 shirts printed for the volunteers (8 offered, but 6 showed including myself and my wife) and 100 of the Gnome Love fliers to hand out**. Many visitors asked about obtaining shirts, some even offered to pay. I advised that we only had enough for the volunteers and that shirts in a similar design and other choices could be purchased on gnome.org. There are quite a few fliers left which I'd be glad to mail to the Gnome Foundation or directly to someone who may need them for an upcoming event.

The hardware I brought performed more than adequately, though there were some occasional hiccups... I upgraded my on-hardware installation of Ubuntu 13.04 & Gnome 3.8.x to Ubuntu 13.10 & Gnome 3.10.1 about a week before the expo and I wasn't able to fully smooth out the niggling glitches before the show. You'd think I learned my lesson, but no, as I also applied an update to the Fedora 20 VM installation on Saturday morning, the first day of the show, which resulted in the Settings/Lock/Power buttons and other Top Bar items becoming huge... However, I suspect it may have been reconfigured by someone else while I wasn't looking because I can't reproduce the issue on an earlier snapshot of the same VM. Here's a screenshot: http://goo.gl/61DiyD

For most of Saturday, the Internet connection wasn't configured properly* and I was tethering via my Android phone which was interesting, especially when I grabbed my phone on my way out to get lunch... Fortunately I had already downloaded the following YouTube video to play locally on repeat which highlighted some features of Gnome Shell. GNOME 3 Features (With GNOME Shell)

Several visitors took the opportunity to complain about specific and general functionality of Gnome Shell which has and/or does cause them to have difficulty using it or, in some cases, not be willing or able to use it. Many of their complaints were regarding the lack of configurability and reduction of features vs. Gnome 2.x. Fortunately, many of these same users were unaware of the Extensions functionality which, once explored, seemed to abate or even eliminate their complaints. One visitor who is an administrator for a large deployment of GNOME users had some specific issues regarding Nautilus choking when users run over their disk quota, and a couple other similar problems specific to enterprise use. I was able to help point him in the right direction using some targeted Google Search queries which he snapped pictures of for later review. However, some users' complaints were not able to be mitigated immediately or even at all... One blind user in particular who represented other differently-abled users, including those with limited vision, explained to me two specific issues which I promised to follow-up on for him and his associates.

Toward the end of the expo hours on Saturday and again on Sunday I fired up a couple visually enticing games (mostly Humble Bundle titles) to play in a window so that the GNOME livery could still be seen. As I predicted, this proved to be quite a crowd gatherer, affording more opportunities to talk about GNOME and show off its features and usability. At the end of the day on Sunday, a bright kid kept talking my ear off while I was simultaneously assisting an older gentleman who was writing instructions on his clipboard for how to access the keyboard shortcut settings. The boy's mother had to drag him away so we could tear down the booth after I looked around and realized we were the only ones in the row who hadn't yet begun to do so! Reminded me of myself at that age... ;-)

I'm willing to lead the effort again next year and hopefully we will be better prepared... I would like to have had a banner and a couple posters framing the booth to advise what GNOME is and its feature highlights, as well as more [knowledgeable] volunteers to share the GNOME Love. Perhaps next year I'll even be able to attend a talk or two. ;-)

*A fluorescent orange paper with static IPv4 & IPv6 configurations including allocation of a range of IP addresses was at each booth. I configured the eth0 accordingly during setup on Friday and initially it worked fine. On Saturday morning and for most of the day it wasn't working. Mid-afternoon I spotted a pair of roving conference techs and asked about it. They said I needed to just use DHCP. When I asked why the papers indicating to use static configuration were distributed to the booths, they said it was just for reference. Face-palm!

**Please advise me regarding who to contact for a receipt so I can claim the expenses as a donation to the Gnome Foundation on my 2014 US taxes.

Cordially,

--
Paul M Edwards