[gnome-love] GNOME Goals birthday!

[Luis Menina <liberforce fr st>]

Hi to all GNOME lovers!

The GNOME Goals project, launched by Vincent Untz last year (ok, I 
missed the birthday by 3 days ;-) ) has been mostly abandonned for a few 
months.

http://live.gnome.org/GnomeGoals

For those who may not know, the GNOME Goals are an easy way for new 
contributer-wannabees to start helping GNOME in some way. It's one of 
the many gates to enter in the community, and join the project.

I've recently talked to Vincent Untz about this subject at FOSDEM. I 
thought (like many others) that GNOME Goals were an important access 
gate, and it was sad that they started dying when Vincent had less time 
to push them forward.

However, after seing Claudio Saavedra adding recently GNOME Goal #3 ( 
http://live.gnome.org/GnomeGoals/ApplicationCategory ), and
Xan Lopez wanting to spread some GTK love ( 
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gtk-devel-list/2007-March/msg00017.html , 
 http://live.gnome.org/GtkLove ), I thought it could be great if we 
could team up to have the GNOME Goals reborn from ashes.

For this to happen, we should define some guidelines:
- define the regularity of each goal (the 2-weeks basis looked good to 
have the project feel strong and alive)
- define what to do with old goals (how to complete them)
- define how a new goal is chosen, and who choses it
- define people who can find qualified people to review the guidelines 
before a new GNOME Goal is launched (to avoid misleading people with 
incorrect guidelines as we did in the past: 
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=362604 )
- define the different domains we want to cover (performance, HIG 
compliance, code update for new widgets, documentation, etc.), with some 
of them requiring NO programming knowledge.
-define how we will popularize this action: gnome-love mailing list, 
wiki, blogs of the the teams members, planet.gnome.org and localized 
gnome planets. We could also when a goal is open cross post the annouce 
on another mailing list of the domain of that goal (for example on 
gtk-devel-list for GTK widgets migration, performance-list for performance)

We should also have some rules:
- the goals must be of reasonable size and of easy complexity.
- they should be easily applied to many softwares. The patches are 
centralized on the wiki page, wich will be helpful for newbies who want 
to see how someone else did it, meaning they will really *learn* from 
the process.
- the guidelines must be self explaining, so they can be easily understood
- a goal can't be set if no team member has time to answer eventual 
questions about that goal
- everything must be traced and centralized in bugzilla. Maybe with a 
the gnome-love keyword. All GNOME goals would then have the gnome-love 
keyword, without all the bugs with the gnome-love keyword being actually 
GNOME goals. That way people looking for easy tasks could also find 
GNOME goals among them.
- an application that is not maintained, or for wich the maintainer or 
developpers never answer for help to achieve a goal should be removed 
from the applications list. Asking newcommers to work or write patches 
with nobody to help them, or read their work is awfully unrewarding, and 
we must avoid that as much as possible.

The GNOME Goal #0 is : convert as many GNOME users we can to actually 
become *contributors*

Here are some proposals. Tell me if you found them good (or bad)... All 
contructive remarks are appreciated.

I'd also like to know if Claudio and/or Xan would be willing to put some 
time here, to build a GNOME Goals team...

Let's make GNOME rock even more altogether!