Re: Accessibility Hackfest - Further Planning

["Bryen M. Yunashko" <suserocks bryen com>]

In the coming weeks, after things start to settle down around here in
NYC, I'll be fully focused on planning our Social Media aspects for our
presence at the CSUN conference.  I'll probably set up a CoTweet account
for us as well so we can be sure our tweets reach maximum audience.

Planet-A11y WILL be up and running for sure.  Actually it is running
now, but I'll be moving it soon to a permanent server and get the ball
rolling on that soon.  

I'll be thinking of strategies for best exposure as well and will
discuss with you all soon.

Thanks Eitan for all your work on this!

Bryen

On Wed, 2010-02-10 at 10:25 -0800, Eitan Isaacson wrote:
> Hello.
> 
> The date is coming up, I think it is time for more planning.
> 
> While a lot of the recent news is discouraging regarding GNOME a11y, I
> hope this upcoming event may be used in a matter that will further our
> cause. The attendance is ending up on the lower side, with the ATRC
> folks not being able to make it, and Willie Walker's recent ordeal.
> So, if there are other folks who think they want to make it, we have
> some travel money put aside, and we could hopefully work something
> out.
> 
> The original plan was an AT developer's summit, where AT folks would
> work on expanding the feature set of their apps, get to demo them to
> potential users, and get ideas from commercial alternatives. I think
> these goals might suffer a bit on the account of not many AT devs
> showing up. So here is a new proposal for the event's focus, hopefully
> it will also be more relevant to the situation we are in right now:
> 
> Schedule
> =======
> March 23: All day hackfest (need to secure a venue).
> March 24-26: Hackfest/Showroom/Conference
> March 27: Booth wrap-up.
> 
> Hackfest
> --------------
> * Let's start dog fooding 3.0 in person, iron out kinks and populate
> bugzilla. I know for myself, Accerciser needs a ton of work for
> at-spi2. It would be cool if we could have maybe a 2 hour session
> where in the first hour we all try out this stuff at once an file all
> the issues we run into, in the second hour triage all of it. Maybe
> Mike Gorse could lead this bit?
> * Let's do a similar session with Webkit. Maybe Joanie could guide us
> through this. The focus would be areas where Joanie and the Orca team
> have not worked already.
>  * Would this be useful with GNOME-Shell? It seems like the issues are
> known, I don't know if this would be a wise use of our time.
>  * What else? How could we use the little amount of time we have in person?
> 
> Showroom
> ----------------
> * We will be demonstrating GNOME to the industry and to users. As far
> as I know, we are the only ones offering a completely free, open and
> accessible personal computing platform, this is huge, and this is why
> we are going to CSUN. In better times Sun would be there too
> showcasing GNOME, but not this year.
> * From my experience in this conference, talk is cheap and many
> organizations say generous things, I want us to be able to follow
> through with this. While it might be wishful thinking on my end, I
> think we need to be prepared for two things:
>    1. Some foundation or company that uses GNOME and wants to improve
> a11y for it's own use, or it's own sake. I want us to be able to
> follow through with this and offer them CVs of dedicated GNOME a11y
> hackers. We could play a part in getting the next grantee, contractor,
> full-time a11y hackers employed.
>    2. Organizations that use GNOME already and depend on it need to
> understand that they should get involved, and should join the GNOME
> advisory board. When we hear of such orgs, we need to get them in
> touch with Stormy. It would be good both for foundation funding and
> for a11y interests on the AD board.
>  * Ben won't be able to do braille handouts, we should find an alternative.
> 
> Conference
> ----------------
> We have four complimentary conference passes. I already know that
> Bryen and Mike showed interest in attending the conference. There are
> strings attached to the passes, we want to get the most out of them.
> Attendees should be reporting back on the conference into the GNOME
> community, this includes:
>  * Planet GNOME posts
>  * Tweets/Identi.ca (I am willing to post daily digests of tagged
> tweets to my blog and to the planet).
>  * Articles for a future GNOME Journal accessibility issue (didn't
> actually ask the GJ folks about this, but they are thirsty for
> content, right?).
>  * Writing for other FOSS (or mainstream) media?
> I blitz of a few days in the GNOME sphere will raise a11y awareness
> among the general developers and community, and we need this kind of
> awareness for GNOME 3.0.
> I and Steve Lee will each be presenting at CSUN, I have not written my
> talk yet, any input is welcome.
> 
> Cheers,
>    Eitan.
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