Re: Suggestion for a presentation.

[Nat Friedman <nat ximian com>]

On Thu, 2002-06-20 at 06:17, Martin Sevior wrote:
> Dear Organizers,
> 	       Since the 1.0 release the AbiWord project has implemented a
> new layout framework that already has yielded significant new features
> like revision marks, tables, end notes and document properties. Our next
> release will incorporate all these and more features.
> 
> I would be happy to participate in a discussion of the roadmap of Gnome
> Office and how it fits in with Bonobo 2. I would be happy to give a
> presentation on why Gnome should have an embeddable full/featured word
> processor and office suite available as a platform resource.

Hi Martin,

Unfortunately, because Jody Goldberg has a scheduling conflict, we've
had a lot of trouble getting a GNOME Office workshop together, like we'd
originally wanted to do.

If you want to give a talk on the state of AbiWord and the general
direction of GNOME Office, from your perspective, that would be fine,
with one important qualification.  What I am trying to focus the summit
on is global issues that affect all of GNOME, with a particular emphasis
on things that are important to users.  

I'm not really interested in having any talks that are about "advancing
the state of the developer platform."  In fact, I think that kind of
discussion is a misdirection of energy from where we need to be going as
a project.  We've just spent the last year with a major focus on the
developer platform, at, I think, a short-term cost to the user
experience.  Though it is certainly our hope that this will result in a
long-term win for users, this will only happen if we emphasize the
user-oriented work that needs to be done, now.

So if you want to give a GNOME office/abiword talk, I am glad to put
that on the schedule, but only if the talk is about how to build a
high-quality & usable office suite for GNOME users.

This is somewhat in contrast to what you said about AbiWord as an
embeddable object for GNOME developers.

What do you think?

Nat