Re: Desktop Summit Planning

[Lennart Poettering <mztabzr 0pointer de>]

On Wed, 14.12.11 13:12, Dave Neary (dneary gnome org) wrote:

> In my mind, GNOME's gotten to the point where those high-bandwidth,
> planning the future discussions (points 2 and 5) have gone beyond
> what we traditionally thought of as the GNOME project.
> 
> Just look at where key GNOME contributors are working now: Lennart
> Poettering is working on audio and system start-up with a clear
> focus on improving the desktop, the browser and web platform have
> become key components of the free desktop, Richard Hughes is working
> on making system-wide colour management a reality, there are kernel
> hackers and Xorg developers working at that level of the stack to
> improve the desktop end-user's experience. GNOME has long been good
> at fixing problems at the right point in the stack, rather than
> patching around infrastructure issues.

Well, but let's not forget that the folks you explicitly list here are
probably more on the side against the colocation than for it. At least
of the one you named first I know that he is against the combined
conf. And I think Richard is too, I think (Richard?), and so are the
(two?) kernel folks I know who attended the conf. And my guess is the Xorg
folks who attended are against the colocation as well.

> In addition, applications like LibreOffice, Eclipse, Mozilla, and
> people buiilding on the GNOME platform (Unity and XFCE come to mind)
> all build on and use our platform, and I think it would be very
> beneficial to get people from these projects together to see what we
> can do to make that platform better for them.

Two things: first of all I don't believe encouraging Unity is in the
interest of GNOME, and secondly: this year's desktop summit did invite
folks from these communities as well, with no real success. I am tempted
to say that the interest from the non-GNOME, non-KDE communities was
close to non-existant. Forlorn hope...

> KDE is also looking down the stack at things like metadata, audio,
> voip, file sharing... - and so I definitely think it makes sense to
> have some relevant KDE people working with the relevant GNOME people
> on avoiding duplication of effort where it's possible.

This definitely makes sense, the question though is whether a desktop
summit is the appropriate forum for that.

> Definitely, the main benefit of the conference has been the
> economies of scale for sponsors - both in organising attendance and
> in sponsorship. I think that potentially broadening the conference
> further will bring greater benefits - making the Desktop Summit
> *the* place to be to talk about the free software desktop would be a
> success in my mind.

Losing focus even further would be fatal for the entire conference I
believe.

> In this last conference, there was a decision early on by the
> program committee, supported by the boards, to limit the scope of
> the conference to KDE & GNOME. Again, even though the schedule
> didn't have KDE & GNOME labels on talks, this created a clear "us &
> them" - it was obvious which talks were KDE ones, and which were
> GNOME.

Ahem, the CFP asked for:

    "Submissions that do not fit into these
    categories are welcome too, provided that they are relevant for the
    GNOME or KDE stacks, free desktops or mobile user interfaces in
    general. We'd like to invite submissions not only from the organizing
    communities themselves but also from users of free desktops, from
    projects and organizations related to GNOME and KDE as well as
    contributors involved in technologies they are based on. Submissions
    with cross-desktop relevance are preferred. We are looking both for
    presentations and lightning talks."

So we asked for non-KDE, non-GNOME submissions, and we accepted at least
one Enlightenment presentation.

> Going back to what I said earlier about the need for a place to
> gather: I wonder if Plumber's hasn't taken on that role from a
> "kernel-up" position, and whether the Desktop Summit should aim to
> do so from a "Desktop-down" perspective? I have nothing against
> smaller events, but the big advantage of a single annual conference
> is that there are a *lot* of conferences, meetings, hackfests and
> whatnot happening these days - do you really want to add one more to
> people's agenda (which potentially could lead them to avoid GUADEC
> altogether, and kill the conference in 1 or 2 years)?

Colocating such a conf with FOSDEM or suchlike should fix this problem
neatly...

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering - Red Hat, Inc.