Hey everybody! Sorry for being invisible and unreachable for the past few weeks. I've moved to another country with my family (lots of cardboard boxes), moved servers and I've been on holidays for the past few weeks. I'm stuck on 3G internet at home and I'm on hotel WiFi ATM (will be back home on the 1st). Also I'm quite busy because I have to get into university and also find a place to live there... The good news is that all this will hopefully be over once I start studying in early October! I think having a snowy hackfest would be great fun! On Aug 25, 2010, at 6:30 PM, Paul Cutler <pcutler gnome org> wrote: 2. When do we want to have it? I've talked to Sandy and Brad, and we were all thinking of a short hackfest over a weekend in October (this will be tight from a timeline schedule to organize) This would be a Friday night, Saturday and Sunday, fly out late Sunday, if possible. For me, a weekend in November would be better. Moving out of my parent's house, starting university and going into a whole new social environment, I think having the October free is the right decision for me. However, in November I'm free. 3. Who wants to come?! Me! 4. Where? Some of our core contributors are in Boston, Los Angeles, Las Vegas and a couple in Europe! I think understanding #3 better will help answer this question. I can understand the challenge for someone from Europe only coming for a weekend. I would not mind flying to the US (I don't often get a good reason to fly there)! A transatlantic flight is not that cheap, but I think I can justify it if we have 2 - 3 productive and fun days. For me the east coast (Boston) would of course be more accessible, but if it proves to be more cost-efficient and easier to get everybody together in the west, that would be OK for me as well. 5. Probably most important, what are our goals? What features do we want to try and tackle? As mentioned by Sandy, we don't have to get together to fix a few bugs. Like Brad suggested, I think we should work on big stuff like sharing and editing. I think these involve decisions about the future of the codebase where it's genuinely useful to talk to each other in real life. I think that we should have a definite roadmap to 1.0 (or 0.x) to be released before the hackfest that we can all work on. For me personally, it's a lot more motivating if I have a definite goal ("Implement this mockup until next Thursday") instead of having a general direction that nobody can quite define ("Make the theme look nicer"). That way we can go into the hackfest with a "clean" codebase that's not missing this or that little feature that somebody meant to do but didn't finish and is blocking progress. Depending on how long this list is, we can have the hackfest sooner or later. I've half-followed the discussion about the Designer Playground on the wiki and Paul's recent efforts to get a definite roadmap together. I'll make sure I'll catch up with that when I get back next week. Once we understand #3 and #4 we have to share a funding request - we'll need a rough idea of flight costs, hotel costs (need to find a hotel!) and potential venue costs. If the hackfest is just a small group of people (3-5) we could potentially get a suite at a hotel and just use that. If it's more, maybe a hotel conference room, or have a sponsor help with space (this may be a challenge of hosting a hackfest over a weekend). Maybe the university (in Boston) has somewhere nice where we could stay? Not sure if universities do this kind of thing... So what I need ASAP is interest if you can come and what you want to work on (or have the knowledge to work on). I would be interested to work on sharing. I think the design decisions there could really influence what is possible in the future (integration with Tomboy, revisions, merging, social...?) We need Python and Django hackers and maybe a designer would be nice. Some kick-ass icons and other artwork would definetly rock! Thank you Paul for getting this going! I think a hackfest could really push snowy forward and help the tomboy-snowy duo become collaborative. Plus, of course just having the prospect of a hackfest is a huge motivation for contributors and a goal to work toward. Best Regards, Leon (Sent from my iPod) |