Re: GNOME annual report

[Dave Neary <dneary free fr>]

Hi German,

Germán Poó Caamaño wrote:
> If there was no written report/account from the Foundation, why should
> you expect that local groups had written them?

I'm not sure what you mean - you're part of the foundation, as I am.

> Probably if you would asked for written reports, you could get more than
> one prepared on time.  The contact list is on the wiki:
> http://live.gnome.org/UserGroups

We need to know what user groups are doing before we can ask for
anything. I would love to see a more vibrant circulation of information
between user groups, and up to the foundation board. That's why I
created the guglasters mailing list. That's why I went hunting for most
of the information in the UserGroups wiki page, and advertised it.
That's why I've been encouraging people to add themselves to the map on
GnomeWorldWide.

I gave a presentation at FOSDEM about developing GNOME through our user
groups. The core point I made is that there is some infrastructure which
needs to be top-down, but most of the work will have to be bottom-up. It
will come from the community - in the same way that the GNOME project
doesn't make any software, GNOME project members do.

We do need to provide the skeleton for collaboration. Of the elements I
envisage as being the basic tools, most are in place - we have the wiki
pages, we have the gugmasters mailing list? I started a shared calendar
for GNOME events - I am still waiting for the first request from anyone
to add events there or help manage it, and it's going to be stale quick
unless people start adding information to it. The only obvious building
block that's still missing (but which is on someone's TODO list on the
sysadmin list) is the creation of a CRM to manage community, user group,
press and business contacts.

For info, that calendar is here:
ICS:
http://www.google.com/calendar/ical/mdnrfqhbsjn37b6sgad089qmak%40group.calendar.google.com/public/basic.ics

HTTP:
http://www.google.com/calendar/embed?src=mdnrfqhbsjn37b6sgad089qmak%40group.calendar.google.com

That mailing list is here:
http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gugmasters-list

The wiki pages are here:
http://live.gnome.org/GnomeWorldWide
http://live.gnome.org/UserGroups

The LiveCD images and VMWare images which Ken van Dine made, and which
allow user groups to easily show off and give away the latest versions
of GNOME, are available here: http://torrent.gnome.org/

Thanks to OSU OSL for hosting and bandwidth, Michael Burns for
installing the machine on short notice, Intel for the server housing the
site,  and Olav Vitters for getting the machine set up.

> To be clear, I don't want to criticize your report, which is a very good
> point of start (even if it a was a big mail message :-).  But the
> clarification of Rodrigo's concerns didn't make sense to me.
> 
> So, in the future, we as a local groups, have the task to write reports
> in order to get included or referenced by the Foundation; in both
> english and native language.

Yes, please.

What happened for this (and what I imagine will happen for future
editions) is that I mailed the board suggesting that we do an annual
report, then made a list of 7 or 8 topics I thought merited a mention in
there - among those were the year in review article, an article on
GUADEC and the Summit, WSOP, the various things we've done for GNOME
user groups and the various events we knew of (we talk about the event
box, the GNOME developer meetings, and the increased budget for user
groups this year), the advisory board and the embedded initiative. I
also had the GNOME platform overview and the hire of Rosanna Yuen on the
list.

Through the process, I got some feedback that we should add some other
articles - distributions that came out with GNOME on them, for example,
 and the www.gnome.org revamp got added in after the first draft of
articles.

Perhaps in future years this process will be more open, this year,
constraints of time and resources meant that it worked best with one
person pulling together the material, and working with a smallish group
of people.

I admit, I was hoping for a different reaction to this announcement. So
far I have had 4 replies, all critical of some aspect of the report.
Doesn't anyone think it's cool that we finally got something like this
(and all of the other user group stuff) done?

Cheers,
Dave.

-- 
Dave Neary
dneary free fr