Re: SFO call for action - aka questionnaire

[Juan José Sánchez Penas <jjsanchez igalia com>]

Hi,

On Mon, Jun 29, 2009 at 03:48:19PM +0200, Nils Faerber wrote:
> About you:
> 1. Please describe your background a little bit, i.e. what are you
> working on that made you interested in Gnome/mobile? If it helps us
> understand your background, who are you working for?

I am one of the founders of Igalia, where I do most of the time coordination
and business development tasks, although I like to consider myself a
developer. We do among other things consultancy and development related to
freedesktop.org and GNOME technologies. Several of our clients use GNOME
Mobile technologies inside their devices/platforms (e.g we have worked quite
a lot inside Maemo during the past years).

> When you first heard of Gnome/mobile:
> 2. What did you think it to be? Please be as frank as possible - what
> were your really *first* thoughts?

We heard for the first time a few years ago when Jeff was organizing the
launch of the then called GMAE initiative. We liked the ideas and the goals,
that were already the ones that are currently explained in the web.

> 3. What did you expect from it? What did you hope to see as a result
> from it?

As I said, I think that our original mission is still very valid today.
Mainly the first two items, which summarize quite well the general view:
"Increase community and commercial visibility of GNOME Mobile technology and
participating organisations" and "Co-ordinate investment in the GTK+ and
GNOME platform, documentation and developer tools".

> 4. Why did you join the group? Do you feel like a "member" at all? If
> not, why not?

We were helping some companies to adapt GNOME technologies to the mobile,
and creating new components using GNOME technologies, so it was natural to
join GNOME Mobile from the very beginning.

And yes, I (and we, Igalia) feel like a member.

> 5. Did it match your expectations? If not, why? If yes, how?

Only partially. Although we have had some good successes and we increased
the awareness of the usage of GNOME in mobile devices, I feel that during
the past couple of years the group has been a bit stalled. Some new
platforms using GNOME Mobile technologies appeared, but this didn't always
translate into more upstream contributions/cooperation. Also, probably we
could have done a bit better attracting new companies to the GNOME Mobile
group, for instance in the case of some of the LiMo members.

> 6. Is there something like a top-three of most important goals that you
> (personally, not thinking of the group as a whole) would like to see
> addressed by Gnome/mobile? (Three would be great, one is enough too)

About the generic goals I already talked in the rest of the answers, so 
I will try to give some more specific ones:
- Revamp the web and add fresh information and success stories (even
demos/screencasts to show how cool a gnome mobile based platform can be)
- Having some kind of periodic (no need to do them frequently) group
meetings, focused on how to increase cooperation (from the technical
cooperation to the marketing cooperation, e.g. the updates of the web, 
or companies with expertise in gnome mobile sharing booths at some 
conferences and showing cool technologies there)
- Creating some commissions to carry out the work. e.g. a group of people in
charge of the web, a group of people in charge of marketing actions, a group
of people helping Ross with the releases if help is needed, etc.
- Some kind of visibility of GNOME in the platforms that use the technology
would be awesome. I guess this is very difficult and goes against the
branding of each of the companies behind the platforms, but if we could
manage to do this for at least some of them it would be a great success. This
idea had been considered in the past but never was actually done, afaik.
- Defining the platform in a more flexible way, adding some more projects to
the current gnome mobile stack (clutter being the more obvious one imho).
- Sponsor and/or organize GNOME hackfests trying to fulfill GNOME Mobile
goals. 
- Maybe we could study if it would make sense to cooperate with some
specific development projects where the companies inside the gnome mobile
group could contribute with workforce. This would give the impression to the
community that gnome mobile is something good for the project.

Everything around the two main ideas of the mission: promoting the GNOME
brand in the mobile, and increasing the cooperation.

> And today:
> 7. How do you perceive Gnome/mobile today? What is missing? What is too
> much? What is / could be Gnome/mobile's first priority goal? And second?

Mainly, I miss more upstream cooperation between the companies/platforms
that are using GNOME technologies in the mobile area, and some shared
actions like the marketing ones. In general, my answer to question 6
can be seen as an answer to this one. 

> Technically:
> 8. What do you think should qualify a platform for being a Gnome/mobile
> platform? A specific set of components used? If yes, which components?

I would be quite open regarding this. A few weeks ago I would have said
"Some of the lower libraries and GTK+ or Clutter", as Ross says in his
email, but after Nokia's announcement for Maemo, I feel that we should
consider a platform using dbus, telepathy, gstreamer, mafw, tracker, gconf
and other glib/gobject components everywhere a GNOME Mobile platform, even
if the UI is neither GTK/Hildon nor Clutter based. 

A simple way of putting it is that any platform/company using a single GNOME
technology is using GNOME Mobile; and then we can decorate this with
adjectives indicating how much GNOME Mobile is used in the platform. It is a
difficult question, no doubt.

> 9. Or should there be a formal qualification process? If yes, what would
> be your idea about it? If not, why not?

I don't think this would make much sense in our current context.

> 10. What should be the technology goals of Gnome/mobile? Like creating a
> toolbox rather than a product? Or collaboration and information
> infrastructure rather than a development project?

Although the idea of creating an end user product, a 'GNOME Desktop for
mobile devices' which was also proposed by some during the GCDS GNOME Mobile
BoF, could be attractive for the very long term, it would be a huge project
on its own and most likely not all the companies interested in GNOME for the
mobile would be interested in such an initiative. It would somehow be a
project inside the GNOME Mobile initiative if at some point it makes sense
and somebody starts it.

For the moment, I think that we should focus in more short term issues, like
making the GNOME Mobile components very popular and used in many mobile
platforms, increasing the awareness of the importance of the mobile in the
GNOME developers, increasing the visibility of GNOME Mobile as a set of
components used by popular platforms, and so on.
 
> Organisation:
> 11. At the moment the Gnome/mobile group is a pretty loose group,
> everyone interested is welcome and can at once participate. Would you
> like to see this a little more formally structured? Like a formal
> membership, application process, levels of membership, voting processes,
> etc.? Or would like to see it grow as is, a group connected by ideas and
> consensus rather than rules? Other ideas?

I think that the current setting is quite ok. I wouldn't say that the
deficiencies that we could find in GNOME Mobile are due to the lack of a
more formal structure (unless you consider my proposals of meetings and
commissions as 'more formal' ;-) ).

Br,
Juan