Minutes from the GNOME advisory board meeting June 1 2005

[Daniel Veillard <veillard redhat com>]

       Minutes from the GNOME advisory board meeting June 1 2005


Administrativia:
================

  This is a day long face to face meeting between the board members and
representative of the advisory board of GNOME. This meeting is usually
held once a year around the GUADEC event, and took place the day after
GUADEC in Stuttgart from 10am to 4:30pm.
  Nokia while not a GNOME advisory board member at this point was
invited to expose how the board and advisory board usually work together
and get feedback from their part on those issues.
  We avoided the language war rathole, it wasn't discutted more than 10 minutes
during the day, but what was said about it is out of record and hence not in
those minutes, which are otherwise covering the full meeting discussions.

  Independantly of the meeting we have a secured location and dates for
the next GNOME Summit meeting, it will be held in MIT, Cambridge MA., USA
10-12 October 2005. Fill your agenda and start booking flights !

Presents:
=========
   Owen Taylor      chair, representing Red Hat
   Carlos Guerreiro representing Nokia
   Luis Villa 
   Daniel Veillard  secretary, Red Hat
   John Rice        representing Sun Microsystems
   Murray Cumming
   Federico Mena    representing Novell
   Matthew Garrett  representing Debian
   Keith Packard    representing Hewlett-Packard
   Tim Ney          executive director
   Greg Kelleher    representing IBM (from 3:30 pm)

Action:
=======

   ACTION: Daniel to send request for proposal to the advisory for specific
           topic to be worked on at the next Summit

   ACTION: Luis to send mail to Keith Packard to check for potential hardware
           donation

   ACTION: Luis to publish his "State of GNOME" slides

   ACTION: Murray to schedule an advisory board phone call meeting in 
           approximately 2 months

Round around the table:
=======================

  Each company representative explained some of their goals, direction and
potential concerns about the GNOME project, this was kept relatively informal

   Nokia:
       Intentions and expectations of Nokia for the GNOME development platform
       Relationship with Immendio and Fluendo
       Positive feedback from a technical viewpoint
       Question about the scope of the GNOME projects and platform requirements
       How to tune GNOME for embedded system or project with smaller hardware 
       requirements:
          - startup time
	  - memory consumption
	  - memory management policies (failures)
       How to get integrated in the project and keep the technical changes from
       the core platform minimal ?
       Feedback from the conference.
       Some of the reason why GNOME matched the needs from Nokia.

    Sun Microsystems:
       Sometime hard to engage new developers around the project
       Some way to expose the culture and get communication going.
       The Summits like meetings are one good way to do this, e.g.
       documentation summit or performance summit for example at
       the next Summit at MIT 10-12 October
       Getting ISV support, need a guideline document, API and ABI stability
       are big concerns. Automated unit testing is useful but we need to
       know what API are really central. Adding unit tests to an automated
       tinderbox like background check would speed up the time to get 
       breakage fixed and reduce the work to get them fixed.
       Usability problem reports: bugzilla is the normal tracking mechanism
       those can be picked up and fixed during the UI review period in the
       release process. Getting remote session software tools and high level
       documentation for accessibility would help a lot getting full community
       support behind fixing usability and accessibility problems.

    Novell: 
       Need UI stability
       Need and work on Automated regression testing (LDTP)
       How to make easier distribution to maintain the older stable versions,
       some kind of centralized place for patches on old branches would help.
       Incomplete documentation.

    Debian:
       GNOME 2.8 should be shipped in the new Debian release expected very soon.
       The Women in Debian project resulted in changes in the level of interest
       toward usability and friendlinesswithin the community, acting like
       the GNOME-love project.
       The dependancy of gnome-vfs/howl on mDNS whose licence is not
       acceptable to Debian, having a list of licences for hard requirement
       on the platform might help ISVs and distributors of the GNOME platform.

    Red Hat:
       Now around 20 people doing GNOME desktop developement, either platform
       level like GTK, D-Bus, Cairo but also new experimental projects at the 
       application layer like collaborative technologies.
       Red Hat want to push a design based approach to new development in GNOME.
       GNOME 3 should not be a big platform break.

Lunch break 

Presentations:
==============

    State of GNOME by Luis Villa. The document is published at
      http://tieguy.org/talks/StateOfGNOME-2005.sxi

    Shared test plans would help a lot, common interest around the LDTP
    (Linux Desktop Testing Project) seems to be shared by the advisory board
    companies:
      http://gnomebangalore.org/ldtp

    Roadmap:
      - the feature list for 2.12 is online
        http://live.gnome.org/RoadMap
      - general discussions

    Finances:
      - what should we be raising money for ? And the how we get that money.
      - fonding some documentation work (gross evaluation 30,000 USD)
      - fonds for marketing at local events
      - Initially partners were paying as board yearly contributions, but now
        we raise most of our money as sponsorship for GUADEC

    What should the foundation be doing to become exciting to the members:
      - do not promote unproved stories or stories with negative points
      - getting testimonials
      - how to get more communication
      - the board to triage problem in the development process and forward
        them to the advisory board list
      - try to get phone calls schedules

Wrapping-up:
============

   Getting the feeling of the usefulness of the advisory board meeting
     - communication channel between the corporations and the community
     - communication channel between corporations around the community
     - need teleconference calls
     - select the most pressing problem from the community and raise them
     - make sure that we have credible success stories


Daniel

-- 
Daniel Veillard      | Red Hat Desktop team http://redhat.com/
veillard redhat com  | libxml GNOME XML XSLT toolkit  http://xmlsoft.org/
http://veillard.com/ | Rpmfind RPM search engine http://rpmfind.net/