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

[Srinivasa Ragavan <sragavan gnome org>]

On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 1:14 PM, Philip Van Hoof<pvanhoof gnome org> wrote:
> On Wed, 2009-08-12 at 10:36 +0530, Srinivasa Ragavan wrote:
>> On Fri, Aug 7, 2009 at 1:38 PM, Philip Van Hoof<pvanhoof gnome org> wrote:
>
> [CUT]
>
>> > 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.
>
> How did they use those numbers? Can you clarify this? What I'm seeing is
> that the board went against the numbers.
>
> Your explanation so far doesn't convince me that they didn't:
>
>> 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.
>
> A very big part of GNOME 3.0 are desktop services. Especially for those
> pieces of technology is cooperation, negotiation and discussion with
> KDE ... much needed.
>
> In fact should GNOME's 3.0 and KDE's 4.x be the desktop environment
> releases that *finally* works well together.
>
> So some people want GNOME Shell stuff. I want KDE's software to
> integrate, be used-by and be rendered into that GNOME Shell UI thing.
>
>> 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.
>
> When? Because if this date still isn't decided yet, then it's quite
> likely that it just wont happen at all.

Wait!. You haven't heard much about the hackfests, because, they
aren't decided on what & where yet. But it was discussed tbh.

>
>> 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.
>
> This is a very confusing, non-coherent explanation for a decision that
> goes against something that is quite clear in the poll's results.

Firstly, the last statement started with 'I felt'. Its my personal
opinion on the results of poll, like every one had their own and that
wasn't the explanation for the decision during the board meeting.

Philip, this is not a vote, where every body entered their opinion. In
my view, this represents a sample of the entire community. We can't
derive boolean results out of this survey. i.e, I wont be able to
choose YES or NO from these. The 140 GNOME people part of a bigger
community who just had a chance to say their opinion. But there is an
another part of people who didnt have  time/chance to see this to
enter a vote or what ever. But when a poll like this was ran, I would
use this to see, what is the view from a sample of the community. I
felt that its divided. Even a voting on a bigger group is done, its
going to be divided. It surely wont be 90% vs 10% or lesser or
whatever.. A part of the community is for it and a part of the
community is against it. Both the parts of the community  aren't
negligible.

-Srini

>
>> Its surely not a yes/no voting for a decison,
>
> So what is a majority 'yes' in 'all configurations' then ?
>
> Besides, if it wasn't clear for all people then why didn't the board
> further discuss the issue on the foundation member mailing list?
>
>> but, we should take care of the entire community.
>
> Good point, and in all configurations did the entire community voted
> with a majority 'yes' over 'no'.
>       ^^^^^^^^
>
>> For the 56% of the people, who said they want the 'Desktop summit'
>> would still benefit out of GUADEC,
>
> You are *again* confusing and miss-representing the poll results.
>
> Those 56% of the people said that they want to co-locate *next* year.
> They didn't say "in some future", no, they said "next" year.
>
> Let me paste the line again for you:
>
> "* 56% said we should co-locate next year, 35% said no"
>
> Note that the 35% includes the people who don't ever want to co-locate
> again. So the question was asked unfairly for the yes-vote. And STILL
> did the yes vote win with a majority of 56%.
>
> Sorry, there's just no misinterpreting possible: the poll *clearly*
> indicates that people want to co-locate *next* year.
>
>> and to meet these people's need we would consider colocating
>> with KDE in future.
>
> "* 26% said we should co-locate in the future but not next year, 31%
>  said no"
>
> This *again* means that people want to co-locate *next* year and that
> the board's solution is *not* what the poll suggests at all.
>
>> Its just not for the next one.
>
> But that is not what the people who voted in the poll suggest. And you
> are making it sound as if that is what they said, but they didn't.
>
>
> --
> Philip Van Hoof, freelance software developer
> home: me at pvanhoof dot be
> gnome: pvanhoof at gnome dot org
> http://pvanhoof.be/blog
> http://codeminded.be
>
>