Re: Free Desktop Communities come together at the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit

[Srinivasa Ragavan <sragavan gnome org>]

On Fri, Aug 7, 2009 at 1:38 PM, Philip Van Hoof<pvanhoof gnome org> wrote:
>
> Majority wants to co-locate next year
>
>> * 55% collaborated with a KDE /GNOME person, 29% did not
>
>
> You can see that in all configurations the majority want to co-locate
> next year. Even if it means not having a profit.
>
> Can you elaborate why the board didn't first discuss this decision with
> the community?

The board members actually used the poll and discussed few other
points in deciding this.

 The main, and most important, reason for not wanting to co-locate
next year is because the GNOME  community needs to focus on GNOME 3.0,
and next year's GUADEC will be the most sensible place to plan and do
whatever finishing work needs to be done. While we support doing
co-located conferences in the future, next year simply doesn't make
the most sense to do this again.  We need to make sure our focus is on
making GNOME 3.0 a finished product and co-locating would likely be a
distraction to this goal.

There were few more points like preserving GUADEC and Academy as one
of main conferences for GNOME and KDE respectively. We co located this
year and if we do next year also, the message could be a bit
different.

It was a hard decision because, there is real interest in making KDE
and GNOME work well together. While this is also an important goal,
but we don't need to co-locate every year for this. We might have
hackfests together with KDE/GNOME in the future.

Board voted for not co-locating it next year, but consider co-locating
in the future. Every body(board) had some opinions, thoughts behind
voting for that. I felt no one in the comments/poll said that they
wanted only 'KDE/GNOME Desktop summit' and not GUADEC alone. But the
people who voted against it, definitely wanted only GUADEC. Its surely
not a yes/no voting for a decison, but, we should take care of the
entire community. For the 56% of the people, who said they want the
'Desktop summit' would still benefit out of GUADEC, and to meet these
people's need we would consider colocating with KDE in future. Its
just not for the next one.

-Srini