Repost: [desktop-devel-list] Guadec focus.

[Dave Neary <dneary free fr>]

Hi all,

This mail was sent to desktop-devel (I picked it up off the archives), but since 
neither I nor most of the guadec planning people are subscribed there, I am 
re-posting it here (and guadec-planning). Hope no-one minds the repost...

The original message (and original follow-ups) are here... 
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2004-January/msg00443.html

I wanted to reply to this, but since I don't want to include my comments in a 
repost, I'll reply to this when it appears on the list.

Cheers,
Dave.

Miguel wrote:
> 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.


--
Dave Neary
bolsh gimp org