Re: [question to candidates] GNOME OS

[Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi gmail com>]

On 2011-05-25 at 08:24, Frederic Peters wrote:
> GNOME OS has been mentioned and questioned repeatedly in recent
> discussions on desktop-devel-list, about its definition itself[1],
> and the changing (or not?) role of the GNOME project with regards
> to distributions (based or not on the Linux kernel).
> 
> What are your thougths on this?[2] Do you think this is a foundation
> job to answer those questions? If not, is this a responsibility of the
> release team? Or something that is best left unanswered, as pieces are
> put into positions by different persons?

I think I already gave part of the answer[0] to Richard about this, so
I'll not restate my position; I just want to elaborate on the role of
the Foundation a little bit further.

the Foundation's role is of a facilitator; the Board should make sure
that the relevant people connect in a positive environment — and not
answer questions of technical or political nature. the direction of the
Gnome project is the sum total of the people showing up to actually do
the work that brings an awesome experience to the users: maintainers,
contributors, translators, documentation team, and QA. it is true,
though, that the project as a whole needs focus and direction. the
release team covers part of that, by working as the technical oversight
for the actual GNOME release. since one of the goals of the "GNOME OS"
is to make sure that the dependencies are actually chosen and developed
with a whole product in mind, chosing those dependencies has become an
important part of the steering process. for this reason, my view is that
the release team needs to be consolidated, and that it should be
integrated by the equivalent of the Linux kernel's "patch liutenants": a
selected list of individuals, chosen by merit and skill and not
necessarily from within the GNOME project itself, that act as reference
point for different sub-systems: the graphics stack; the power management;
the network stack; etc. these people would be reference points, and
gatekeepers of the QA process — not a steering committee, but maintainers
that will answer to the requirements of the designers, and will keep the
design team and the release team distributions teams in the loop with the
various projects that GNOME depends on. this will help maintainers within
the GNOME project, but will also help the teams of packagers inside the
distributions. *this* is something that the Foundation Board can create
and direct, and I'd be glad to help do if I'm elected.

another role for the Foundation Board is getting OEMs, OSVs and ISVs come
to GNOME, and see GNOME as a compelling product for creating compelling
devices. not a toolkit with a reference user experience, but a complete
solution that can accomodate customizations of design and features — in
the open, and with amazing talent already available. we have a long way
to go for this, but offering a cohesive experience in terms of design,
development and deployment is a worthy goal that should be helped in
terms of marketing, as well as documentation and development.

ciao,
 Emmanuele.

[0] https://mail.gnome.org/archives/foundation-list/2011-May/msg00016.html

-- 
W: http://www.emmanuelebassi.name
B: http://blogs.gnome.org/ebassi