GNOME 3.0 Hackfest + 1 day conference (in Asia)

[Frederic Muller <fredm gnome org>]

Dear Release Team,

Following a short but intense visit under #release-team it appears that 
communication hasn't been great and we (@GNOME.Asia) got the release 
date wrong. It also seems that some of you if not the majority were not 
aware about what we have been working on since September.

To sum up, in September GNOME.Asia committee who has been organizing the 
GNOME.Asia Summits since 2008 contacted a few people from the release, 
marketing and documentation team to see if there was a benefit and an 
opportunity to combine the GNOME 3.0 launch with the 4th edition of 
GNOME.Asia by having a 3-days hackfest around the release date. It 
seemed from the feedback received that it was a good idea and we 
continued working on it, making a pre-event survey and attending the 
GNOME Boston Summit to gather more feedbacks from the participants.

So now that we have received 3 compelling proposals from 3 potential 
hosting cities together with budgets (Bangalore, Bali and Hong Kong) and 
we would like to confirm the date of such a hackfest with all the teams 
concerned.

The idea is to get all the work that needs to be done by each team 
(release, doc, marketing) finalized before or during the release by 
getting everybody in the same place, assuming there is a benefit of 
doing so. I was made aware by some members of the release team that the 
best dates for one team might not be the same for the others. I suppose 
we'll need to find some compromises or accept the fact that not 
everybody will actually come for various reasons. It would also be great 
to have someone from the release team even if the dates are a bit off. 
The GNOME Foundation will provide travel subsidy to people interested to 
come and talk at the conference and it could be a great opportunity to 
meet different people with different cultures and expectations of GNOME.

So looking at http://live.gnome.org/TwoPointNinetyone when would be the 
best time for each team to come together?

The 4th day would be the opportunity to have a conference open to the 
public and "publicly launch" GNOME 3.0, get some traction and the press 
to cover the event, knowing the people doing the real work will actually 
be around. This would also help to attract more contributors from Asia 
and widen the GNOME community, building on 3 years of GNOME Summits in 
the region and an official launch event.

So what do you say?

Thank you.

Fred