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

[john palmieri <john j5 palmieri gmail com>]

On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 8:05 AM, sankarshan <foss mailinglists gmail com> wrote:

[taking foundation-announce out of the cc: fields]

On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 10:36 AM, Srinivasa Ragavan<sragavan gnome org> wrote:

[snippet]

>  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.

Would it be then appropriate to conclude that in-spite of the really
positive blogs|reports from the GCDS, the underlying feeling is not
conducive towards co-location ?

I don't think these two necessarily correlate.   We have hugely positive blog posts every year.  I don't think I saw a spike this year.  What you can conclude is our community gets pretty excited and that perhaps refrains from overly negative comments directly after a conference.  I don't think I have ever seen highly negative blog posts after the conclusion of any of our conferences.

Personally I wouldn't say the underlying feeling is not conductive towards co-location.  Remember the decision to not co-locate next year doesn't mean we don't want to co-locate, just that next year it won't happen for our flagship conferences.  It may very well happen for other conferences and I'm guessing we will see a better planned out conference if we have two years to reflect on how the Desktop Summit went instead of make a quick decision to go for it directly after this one.

I can tell you I was on the fence when I voted as part of the board to host a co-located event last year.   I thought it was a good idea to experiment with the idea of "slowly" integrating the two communities but I wanted to avoid the issues we had faced with Freedesktop.org which was the false idea that without careful thought we would magically merge into one desktop to rule the world.  Notice we voted for for a "co-located" event instead of a "joint" or freedesktop event. 

To sum it all up - fools rush in.  We really need to take a step back and really try to understand what we wish to accomplish in another co-located event given the grand experiment of the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit.  Given that the polls were not overwhelmingly for or against (I would say they pointed to a more moderate, "I had a good time so yay either way") we should look at the no for next year as a middle ground also.   It allows us to discuss the pros and cons on the Foundation list without hamstringing efforts to organize next years conference (we really need to start organizing now).  I would say it is very likely we will co-locate the following year and even organize smaller events sooner than later.  If we want to do this right, we do it slowly and methodically.  We don't rush in because of an air of urgency due to impatience.

--
John (J5) Palmieri
Concerned GNOME Citizen