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Hi all!
I believe that there are 4 matters on the table, which can deserve our effort as marketing team: 1) Who lead GNOME? Is it still a community driven project? It seems to me that
during
last months, many of the Ubuntu contributors left the Ubuntu
projects
in which they were involved because they've felt that the role of
Canonical inside Ubuntu overwhelmed community. At the same time, I've
heard many friends considering to work for GNOME as working,
ultimately, for Red Hat. 2) Where GNOME is going? In my post blog I've talked about the circle of trust made by developers and designers, and the difficulties for a newcomer in joining this circle. I believe there are at
least 2 problems. The first one is that the (perceived) lack of
focus, of guidelines, of roadmap, bring with it the vibes that
everyone could give an hand just giving an hand, and of course all
that create some confusion because if the contribute doesn't fit
to
project, it could be useful, or worse. I well know this problem, e.g. when someone ask me to participate to Media relations projects, and she/he's not able to distinguish between press release and (technical) release notes. Moreover, a not so clearly shared roadmap, and the lack of small tasks, gives the opportunity to contribute only to those people who are able to spend many of their time on some projects, or can discuss directly with project maintainers via IRC channels, IM, and so on. This is a great way to have full time employed people, but cuts off all the contributions of that we can call “casual lovers” that, IMHO, are a large amount of possibly contributors. From the other side, designers and developers, could have no time to discuss plenty every detail with everyone who's approaching, but this is really a leaking of volunteers and contributions. 3) Everything is given When GNOME Shell has been released, I have been a first time lover, and one of my friend (a GNOME guy) asked me my feedback about it. I wrote many blogposts and the conclusion was, in a nutshell, “Very good, too black to me”. He accepted my provocation of a pink shell (you can take a look here [1], if you please) and nodded about the usefulness of a light theme, that never has arrived. Is very easy to comprehend why many people reconsidering their participation in GNOME, believing their efforts are totally useless, because it seems that everything is given. At last UDS, in CPH, I was attending Andreas talk about new desktop features (sorry Andreas if I'm trotting you out :) ) and the guy who was sitting beside me was very disagreeing with Andreas. So I've asked him to chime-in and explain his doubts, but his answer has been that it was useless, because everything has already been planned elsewhere.
[1] http://weisghizzi.ilcannocchiale.it/2011/04/26/vita_da_shell.html 4) Is GNOME really welcoming? Yes, definitely, it is. But, really, single persons are very often much better than working groups. As Allan said, there are too much bad même out there, that could sometimes offer a distort vision of GNOME Community. I know, sarcasm, irony, jokes, are concrete that make relations of some part of this community stronger, and they could be very funny, but, by an outer glance, they could be read as a sign of self-referentiality, sometimes of some kind of machism too. I believe that, as
marketing team, we should take more spaces (on blogs, social
networks, IRC meetings and so on) to demonstrate that yes, we
could
love joking, but here there are people worth to be known and to
work
with. Sorry for loooooooooong mail, I hope my effort in writing this letter will be appreciate and will be considered my first contribution to make some of this things better. Flavia
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