Re: Call for hackfest ideas

["Luis Villa" <luis tieguy org>]

On Tue, Apr 15, 2008 at 8:48 AM, Vincent Untz <vuntz gnome org> wrote:
> Hi,
>
>  I guess most people have read various blog posts about how the GTK+
>  hackfest went, and I've heard there'll be a small report about it too.
>  But the general feeling seems to be that it was really useful.
>
>  One of the things the Board wants to see happen this year is hackfests,
>  and the fact that the GTK+ one was a success is a good sign that we
>  should do this :-) But to make this happen, we need help from the
>  community to come up with ideas of hackfests and we also need help from
>  volunteers to lead this effort.
>
>  So if you can think of a topic that would be suitable for a hackfest,
>  please talk about it with a few people and share your idea.

I'm curious- I see some fairly low-level suggestions here (gio
porting, pixbuf loaders) but it was my impression that part of what
made the gtk hackfest so successful is that it was at least partially
about decision making rather than coding- the face-to-face presence
made vision-sharing/direction-setting very easy, which led to
important decisions being made, and great hacking as well. Was this
the impression of the folks at the gtk hackfest as well?

If that is part of what made the gtk hackfest successful, should we be
thinking about higher-level stuff (widgets/gadgets, panel replacement,
collaboration software, etc.) where the critical parties need to get
together and make decisions and then write code, as well as/instead of
lower-level stuff where the decisions are known and we 'merely' need
to get coding done? (Coding is obviously important, so I'm not
knocking those, I just am wondering if we should be sure to explicitly
include some of the bigger-picture items as well.)

Luis